


Catching Your Breath (in seven simple steps)

by circa (stealthturtle)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Action, Alpha Derek Hale, College Student Stiles Stilinski, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Poetry, Porn with Feelings, Romantic Fluff, Texting, internalised pining derek, lovers figuring their shit out, sex and heavy introspection, so much feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:42:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stealthturtle/pseuds/circa
Summary: It's the way Stiles slips out from the loft like a cheap fuck leaving before sunrise could damn him; the way they avoid each other's eyes at pack meetings and the constant thrice fold-showering before he could rub the smell of Derek out of his skin. But sometimes he feels like this is all he'll ever want to know: the thrill of being shoved in-between places like he's a well-kept secret, the constant precariousness of the line they're treading. He likes to think his heart was an acrobat, his sanity the balancing act.And there is Derek, holding the other end of the tightrope that's keeping him afloat.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 64
Kudos: 538





	1. One through Six

**Author's Note:**

> for silver, grey, lyra, rachel, kyra, and niki
> 
> took me nearly a month to write this. i just planned for a cute, sexy fic but this grew six legs and ran away from me less than 30k words later.
> 
> i hope you all like it!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> art by the amazing  spaceprincessem 

**First step**

The fast descent into further lycan madness started with a single kiss. 

And it wasn't _just_ a kiss, you know, he's had kisses before and he could tell you they weren't like this; weren't even in the same stratosphere as this Kinsey scale-shattering kiss that launched a thousand ships of inner turmoil in Stiles' Trojan mind. This kiss was unforgiving. He couldn't even tell you it took his breath away because that wasn't correct, it wasn't _severe_ enough, it had to take his _whole lungs out_ with it and then morph into a frown and a mouth telling him, "I should go," and fuck that kiss, _fuck it with the ferocity of a thousand burning meteorites._

Meteorites, right? 

He studied Astrology before in 8th grade when he still believed that Lydia Martin would most definitely end up with him because Jackson was a fucking _Gemini_ and who the fuck wants to end up with a Gemini? He tricked himself into believing empty feeling in his gut every lonesome night was because of "mercury retrograde _",_ and that if he was lucky, one of these fucking days one of the billion burning stars would finally notice and grant him a wish. 

But he never got his wishes, all he got was an encyclopedic knowledge on natal charts and the wisdom of every wannabe psychic on the Reddit forums packed away in his brain. So he _knows_ the cosmos, he knows Orion and Sirius and all the facsimiles of the Big Dipper Scott often mistook the real one for whenever they went stargazing on the rooftop. _But nothing --_ nothing could have prepared him for Derek Hale. Because he - he did this thing, this thing where he left Stiles with fingertip-shaped bruises on his bicep and a mouth buzzing with the scratch of a beard and then after, when he left the same way he came in, it felt like the universe had gone and shifted on its own axis when he wasn’t looking, too caught up in the feeling of Derek’s mouth on his.

That’s how he left him, too.

And Stiles had stood there, crowded up against his bedroom door, apparently now a hot spot for every interaction he's ever had with Derek, trying to calm his jackrabbiting heart by reciting all the constellations he could remember: _Orion. Sirius. Cepheus. Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. Canis Major. Canis Minor. Delphina. Centaurus._

Fuck, Adderall. He should take his Adderall. He forgot to take it again today, didn't he? It's all this goddamn supernatural crime-fighting. It's screwed up his body clock and suddenly it's polyphasic sleeping and irregular medication for him for the foreseeable future, which is dangerous since he’s barely been hanging on by a damn thread lately. 

Damnit _,_ where'd he--? Oh, it's in the back pocket of his bag. There it is. Two? One? Risk two...he probably shouldn’t _._

Dry swallowing makes it taste like ass _._

He peels himself off the wall, body heavy like he’s been stuck to it for two days, and he goes to sit on his computer chair. On the monitor is the search results for American mistletoe, the very thing Derek had asked him to create an entire packet of information for before the conversation devolved into arguing about Stiles’ endangerment and “ _fuck you, Derek, I’m not some goddamn chess piece to plan around. You plan_ with _me or without me,”_ and then the sudden, feet-sweeping moment when he suddenly found his tongue wrapping around another and it’s --

This confusing, _maddening_ occurrence of a lifetime where he suddenly feels like he has two left feet but the universe signed him up for salsa classes anyways.

Because this wasn’t how he and Derek operated. No sir, _this does not compute._ Stiles was the side-kick, the comic relief. Someone had to, their life was _dreary._ He was the kid who was dumb enough to be brave and he has the barbed-wired baseball ball bat to prove it. Scott was always the protagonist of the story; he was the charming prince who got the girl and the powers and the star-crossed lovers schtick that rivaled Romeo's because Scott didn’t need a ladder to sneak into Allison’s bedroom, he had his dimples and werewolf strength and Stiles had absolutely none of that. 

What he has is a red hoodie that still has singe marks on it from when they burned Peter down but failed anyways. What he has is an overgrown used-to-be-buzzcut (he remembers, viscerally, of how Derek pulled at the short hairs on the nape of his neck) and fragile bones and a self-sacrificing streak a mile wide, so could someone _please_ explain to him why Derek had looked at him as if he were a heartbreak waiting to happen?

The synapses in his brain are yelling at him to make it all make sense. They can’t do it, can’t connect to each other to process the absolute what-the-fuckery of that kiss and that _look_ and the hands that felt like they were big enough to swallow his whole. 

“Jesus,” he breathes out into his hand, brushing against his lips like he’s trying to capture the phantom feeling of Derek’s mouth on the swirls of his fingertips. 

You don’t forget people like Derek Hale. He’s got these eyes that pin you down and the claws for breaking you to match. And then that stupid leather jacket (Stiles remembers it feeling butter-soft under his palms), his ungodly Camaro, his deep-rooted trust issues, and see, last time Stiles checked he didn’t even _like_ Derek. 

When _was_ the last time he checked? Maybe it was three years ago, when he was still a sophomore and Derek was a suspected felon. He can’t quite remember checking again, in between running for his life, graduating high school, and bashing creatures’ heads in, he’s missed the mark on evaluating his sexuality and completely skipped on over to accepting Caitlin was on to something about him all this time. 

He dives for his cellphone, shakily typing out the first few letters of Derek’s contact. And there it is, with a picture of Derek he got off the BHHS Yearbooks and Speed Dial #3 listed under his name. And huh, he’s maybe missed the mark on more than one thing these past few years. 

_We need to talk._

He sends it before he could lose the courage to follow through. His heart is still hammering in his chest, head reeling from surprise and the surge of hormones that overcame his body. He looks down at the tent of his sweatpants and feels a blush rush to his face. God, Derek probably _smelled_ how turned on he was. Embarrassment pools in his stomach but there is the overlying, undeniable feeling of being worked up thoroughly.

It takes him a moment of deliberation, choosing between figuring out what just transpired and figuring out how fast he could take care of the other problem at hand. Reaching a decision, he grabs his erection in his hand and squeezes it, not meaning to moan so openly but does anyways. His mind immediately goes back to the memory of that kiss, the one that crackled like lightning inside his chest not even fifteen minutes ago. Derek’s mouth was so soft, so incredibly and surprisingly soft that Stiles didn’t notice how _rough_ Derek was being until his lips started stinging and the door frame was digging into the meat of his back. 

Derek had been an overwhelming presence along his body, had pressed up so close Stiles felt the buckle of Derek’s jeans catching on the tender flesh around his belly button. He kissed Stiles like he was angry about something, tongue plunging into his mouth like he’s chasing down an argument he’s trying to win with it. 

The front of Stiles’ sweatpants turns dark an inch below the waistband, wetness from the head of his dick soaking into the fabric. He shoves it down fully, taking his cock in a proper grip without so much as saliva making the drag of his palm on the skin of it any easier. He’s gone on reliving the clacking of their teeth each time Derek kissed him into a feeling near to submission, tilting his chin up with the forceful nudges Derek pushed his mouth to follow. His shirt and sleeve had been rucked up to give way to the werewolf’s hands gripping the skin under it, and he groans when he thinks about how it would probably bloom purple tomorrow, be sore to the touch and a direct reminder of who put it there. 

Stiles’ hips buck into his hands, his computer chair creaking under the shifting of weight. When he licks his other mouth to lather it some with spit, he can’t stop himself from imagining it’s Derek’s hand he’s licking, Derek’s hand that’s taking a turn to tug on Stiles’ cock and spreading the pre-cum around the engorged head of it. He imagines if Derek would be rough even with this, even with Stiles open and vulnerable and panting into Derek’s skin as he brings him off with tight, steady strokes. Stiles would have liked to sink his teeth in the divot of Derek’s clavicle when he comes, and his gums suddenly start itching with the need for it to be real and not just a fantasy to get off to. 

He uses his other hand to massage at his balls, rolling them in tandem to his strokes. It doesn’t take long from there, not when he’s suspended in recreating the kiss in his mind that was hotter than it had any right to be. He squeezes the base of his dick before coming messily into his shirt, crying out as quietly as he could and milking his orgasm until the last intense dregs of it abate. 

His hands tremble a little as he stares dazedly at his come-striped fingers. 

The heavy realisation of what he’s done crashes into him fully once he’s cleaned himself up haphazardly with a Kleenex. He checks his phone again to see if Derek even replied to his message. 

He’s not surprised to see nothing at all.   
  


**Second Step**

He would be lying if he said he wasn’t looking forward to the next pack meeting. He’d been buzzing out of his skin for half an hour while he was parked outside the loft, two hours too early. He hasn’t been early to anything since his Dad’s last re-inauguration ceremony. 

There’s a visiting pack from Oregon taking a rest stop at Beacon Hills, and some archaic werewolf tradition states that it’s only courteous to meet with the local pack to pledge some weird fealty while they’re under the Alpha’s nose. And so they had to show face, show a united front and generally give off the _don't fuck with us_ vibe. Which is all fine, really, other than the fact that he's pretty sure throwing himself in a room full of werewolves who could _smell_ emotions was a bad idea and would end up with everyone thinking he had a bomb strapped to his chest. 

He pulls his keys out of the ignition and gets out of his car, closing it roughly and with hands that felt cold against the Jeep's exterior. Californian summers are a phenomena to behold, but more so is his perpetually low body temperature. He trudges up to the loft and almost brains himself on the wood when he catches Derek in mid-workout, arms engaged in an effortless set of pull-ups, and seriously, who the _fuck_ works out in this heat? 

"Hey du - _Derek_ ," he starts, leaning on the doorframe, "Sorry I'm early but, uh, I couldn't wait to talk to you. If that's, like, cool." 

Derek pauses, still holding himself up. He eventually drops to his feet and grabs a towel that’s thrown over the back of a chair. It gets wiped around the werewolf’s neck and through his hair, and Stiles has a hard time not staring at the sheen of sweat that blinks mockingly at him as it catches the fluorescent light overhead. _This_ , it calls out to him, _this is how you create chaos._

“So talk,” Derek says coolly, walking towards his fridge to retrieve a bottle of water. His Adam's apple bobs up and down as he takes a pull from it, and Stiles’ gaze gets drawn to the cords of his neck. 

“It’s just, you know, you sort of…” Stiles trails off, still stuck in place, rubbing the back of his neck. He doesn’t know what anxiety smells like, but he’s pretty sure he’s a concentration of it right now. “You sorta...kissed me?” 

Derek doesn’t even deign to look surprised at his direct - albeit weak - confrontation. So his mouth runs off with, “And dude, I know you’re all for walking the talk except you don’t...like doing the talking part either but, see, I do, and I’m just - just really confused right now? So I wanted to...talk,” he finishes lamely. 

“You’re not sure?” Derek asks, still standing barefoot, shirtless, and sweaty in his goddamn kitchen. _Fuck him_ , Stiles thinks, _fuck him for playing a game I never signed up for._

“Oh no," he scoffs, "I’m _sure_ I’m confused, big guy, ‘cause you? _You suck._ You can’t just -” he brings his arms in front of him in vague gesticulation - “just _kiss_ someone and then not respond to a text. That’s shitty, Derek, even for you! And you didn’t even try to explain yourself, just up and left and made me wonder how the fuck we got there. That’s _so_ not cool.” He walks further in the loft with a determined set to his face and is pleased to see something shift in Derek’s expression. But it’s _not fair_ because Derek looks so striking that even if Stiles was mad at him, his stomach betrays his anger and leaves it to do acrobatic flips when Derek reaches forward and places a hand on his hip. His hand is warm, _unbelievably_ warm. Stiles has never been and never will be that warm. 

It makes him want what he doesn't have.

“Slow down,” Derek tells him, “your heart’s going insane.” 

“ _You’re_ insane,” Stiles insists. “Derek I have literally cornered you and you’re still not talking straight.” 

“You’re not letting me.” 

“Then _talk.”_

Except, Derek doesn’t.

What he does is frown at him, then pulls his hand away from Stiles’ hip like he’s been burned only when he caught it laying there.

And somewhere beneath his ribcage, his heart twinges a little. It twinges a lot more when Derek starts swiftly walking past him, leaving a trail of wind that blows by Stiles in his haste to escape. Stiles waits three seconds before he’s tearing past the kitchen to catch up with Derek, who was headed to his bedroom with a hand already pulling out a shirt from the drawers.

Stiles wants to punch him. There’s this irrational need to do something reckless simmering in his chest, because he keeps not getting answers that he needs in this life and he keeps trying to figure out why, but then there’s the utter fallibility of his unlucky stars and how his life keeps trying to _escape him._ Like smoke, like he’s lost the reins of his life to the supernatural and watched the ashes of it embed into the walls of Derek’s depressing home. And Derek, god _fuck you,_ Derek. 

He realises he’s said it out loud when the werewolf’s glower turns its favourite angle of murderous, and Derek’s demanding from him, “Why are you so angry?”

But Derek doesn’t _get_ it, does he? 

“You’ve asked me five hundred questions for the past four years,” Stiles says with coiled tension, “and I’ve busted my ass to get you a response to each one of them every time. I am asking you _this one time_ a question that you can actually answer.”

When the werewolf doesn’t respond, he continues, “I have been going through this kind of _life_ with you blind, Derek. You owe me this." 

Derek looks confused, and _that's good,_ Stiles thinks. Because Derek never had to be as confused as Stiles was, navigating the impossibility of this world and the mortality Stiles had to watch out for more than anyone else did. Stiles has been confused for years, has been piloting this ship with one foot plunged into the ocean that's always threatening to sweep him under. 

"I don't owe you anything," Derek insists, and he's stepping forward, like he's daring Stiles to throw it back at him again. Part of Stiles wants to back off, wants to turn tail and not feel so much like prey, but there's only two feet of space between them and Stiles has never felt so _close_ to finally figuring something out. 

He closes the distance, grits out, " _Wrong_ answer," and then he's crashing his mouth against Derek in a furious kiss. The older man doesn't wast his time, _thank fuck_ , he gets with the program and he's - holy shit - he's all sweaty skin and _so fucking warm_ and Stiles is giving as good as he's getting, using his tongue to demand an explanation from Derek. He pulls himself flush against Derek's unclothed torso, pushing chest against chest until he feels the beat of Derek's heart ricochet through his shirt. 

Derek pulls at his hair again, forces him to throw his head back and licks a long stripe on his throat from down-up. He should've known Derek liked to bite, and his throat could serve a feast with stupidly pale flesh at the ready for marking. Derek poses his teeth over his jugular and Stiles inhales sharply, body freezing as he stops breathing to see what happens next. 

Derek rakes his teeth across it, stopping only when his teeth halts into the bump of Stiles' throat. 

He doesn't breathe, refuses to. 

“Aren’t you afraid of me,” Derek murmurs more than asks against his taut throat. 

Stiles takes a shuddering breath.

“Is this clear enough for you, Stiles?” 

_No_ , he thinks, “It could still be clearer.” 

The bed was _there_ okay, and he wasn’t exactly going to put that space to waste. But he blinks and he feels like he misses it, because the next thing he processes is that he’s being pushed down a mattress with Derek's solid weight hovering over him. He knows that there should be warning sirens blaring in his mind, some hard words from the lectures his father taught him when he was 13 about playing with fire, yet there is - nothing. Nothing but Derek’s mouth finding his and their tongues meeting for what feels like the first time, unfurling the traces of aggravation with just the soft presses of lips against lips, catching together and separating with delicate, wet sounds. 

His hips are right below Derek’s hulking form, always so strong and sure. Stiles anchors himself on the werewolf’s shoulders, just on this side of fearful that he’s going to drown in this feeling and let it saturate his lungs. Derek stands on his knees just to tug Stiles’ shirt up and off of him, immediately running his hands down the narrow point of Stiles’ torso. He’s not at all prepared to be shoved roughly up the headboard, with only the grey pillows saving his head from cracking against it.

He only had a second to yelp before they’re kissing again, deep and languorous and nothing like their first kiss or their second. And like this, he learns what it is to have Derek as his only focal point. A few seconds ago it felt like he was drowning, but now he is all-too aware of everything but the man above him being drowned _out._ Stiles feels the polyester sheets scratch against his jeans and shit, he’s still wearing shoes. He kicks them off and it falls down somewhere, somewhere that isn’t in the warmth of Derek’s breath mixing with his. He tastes like coffee, and something about knowing what the inside of Derek’s mouth tastes like makes his cock stir in his jeans. 

Stiles moves one hand to check if Derek was as interested in getting off as he was, and he makes an appreciative sound when he feels the long, thick line of muscle straining against the only clothing the werewolf has on. He holds it through the fabric and feels Derek buck into his touch and _oh_ is this going where he thinks it is? 

Stiles comes up for air, feels like he’s breaking the water’s surface, and asks, “Are we going to have sex?” 

Derek looks down at him like he’s dumb, and he kind of feels like it. “What do you think?” 

“Uh, I want to?” Stiles says despite his empty lungs. “I wasn’t sure if you, y’know, did. Just making sure here, man.” 

Derek’s response grounds his erection down, slow and dirty against Stiles’, and the motion wrenches a sound he’s embarrassed to have come out of him. Derek doesn’t say anything else, just climbs off Stiles to unbutton his jeans and lies down next to him. Derek looks expectantly at the younger man and Stiles thinks judgment shouldn’t look _that_ attractive, but it does. He does.

Stiles follows suit, fumbling with the clothes on his body like he’s forgotten how they work, but he gets there, he does, and he eventually decides he wants to be on top of Derek for this. He climbs over Derek and straddles his hips between his legs and just looks, just takes him in. He’s something carved in the image of sculptures that would envy the creation of Derek Hale. Planes of skin, ridges of muscle, and warmth. Stiles still can’t get over the warmth. 

And Derek lets his look linger, but eventually gets impatient with the way he gets both their cocks in his big hands, stroking lazily like they don’t have an appointment with two packs in under two hours. 

Stiles has had sex before, has experimented in the first year of college until the decision to take a gap year in the middle of his secondth came along. He’s held bodies in his hands, has tasted and touched but still, there were no notes to compare to how it feels like to have a born predator under his thighs. He gets struck with a curiosity to see how far he could push Derek until he comes undone, the whole nine yards of flashing eyes and showing fang. 

“Lube?” 

Derek grunts when he reaches over to the end table to retrieve a bottle of KY, the silhouette of its contents showing that it’s been barely used. Stiles briefly considers the implications of this: has Derek not been sexually active? Was it a new bottle? 

It gets uncapped and dribbled between their members, and Derek hisses when the cold lube coats him. Stiles takes over from there, running slick hands up and down where they’re coupled together. Derek has his hands clamped down on the younger man’s waist, sometimes switching further down, fingernails biting at Stiles’ ass. They gyrate together in staccatos, clumsy and without the ease lovers would have. But Stiles doesn’t give a shit about that now, he gives a shit about getting off, coming onto Derek’s abs and licking it all off of him. 

_“Fuck,”_ Derek whispers, hips canting up and lifting the entirety of Stiles with it. “Just like that.” 

The thing is, Stiles doesn’t need encouragement when he’s plenty enraptured with Derek’s dick. It’s slightly longer than his and thicker, almost daunting in girth. It’s heavy in Stiles’ hands and curves slightly in, showing its shade of arousal with a deep red. It’s an entirely self-indulgent thing to experiment strokes with it, rubbing the sides of the cut and uncut heads of their dicks together and seeing either one leak beads of precum. He’s as hard as he is fascinated. 

He reaches behind him and tries to palm Derek’s balls, but Stiles’ tall frame makes it harder to reach down and inwards. He finally makes it work when he unsticks his cock from Derek’s in favour of angling back, one hand fondling the older man’s balls and another still pumping him towards completion. Stiles has always been one to hyper fixate on the details, it’s one of the hallmarks of his coping mechanisms with ADHD, so he catalogs the expressions that cross Derek’s face as he lets Stiles take care of his orgasm. Stiles teaches himself which movement of his wrist makes Derek hiss softly, what direction was best to massage his balls to make him cuss under his breath. And when he makes Derek come, Stiles burns the image of it in his mind so he never forgets the surge of wonder he felt with it. 

Stiles is still hard and he _aches_ with it, and with the added lubrication of Derek’s come on his hands, he jacks himself off in quick strokes, spilling his seed messily into the older man’s torso. He cries out and pitches forward with the force of his orgasm, planting one hand next to Derek’s head as they crash together for a kiss; they kiss and they kiss until his body stops zinging with pleasure and his cock softens along with the rest of his body. He’s pliant enough to let Derek roll him to the side. 

He doesn’t come down from it like he usually does. He’s vigilant, hyper-aware of Derek next to him. He can smell their combined release in the air, heavy and unpleasant. 

Stiles must be in an alternate reality, one that doesn’t belong to him. Derek is carefully rubbing his stomach and Stiles’ hand as clean as they can get with the older man’s discarded shirt, dirtying it with white smears. When he’s deemed them both clean enough, Derek collapses back to the mattress and crosses a forearm over his eyes, heaving a tired, content sigh. Stiles inches forward and gingerly places a chin on the swell of Derek’s bicep. 

Derek peeks at him and meets Stiles’ way-too alert eyes. 

“I’m a little less confused,” Stiles says. 

The corner of Derek’s mouth turns up with a huffed laugh. “Congrats.” 

Stiles taps his fingers against the pulse of Derek’s carpals and asks, “Can we go again?” 

“Can’t,” Derek murmurs, “pack meeting soon.” 

Stiles snorts and tells him, “Sure, bring ten werewolf noses to this loft after we just had sex. Even _I_ can smell it, Derek."

“I’ll text them to meet at another place.” 

“Don’t tell me you’ve got another abandoned warehouse to hang out in?” 

“No,” Derek responds and traps Stiles’ fingers that are idly dancing across the inside of his arm. “I have a house. The preserve.” 

Stiles weasels his digits out of Derek’s clutches but the man only tightens his hold. He lets his hands slump in defeat, and his heart jumps when Derek laces them with his. He even squeezes once. 

“You do realise we need to shower like, ten times before we go?” 

“I figured. Do you have clothes with you?” 

“I'm a little disappointed to say I’m not prepared for impromptu sex with the local Alpha.” 

Derek shoots him an unimpressed look. “You can borrow some of mine.” 

“Like that won’t throw them off at all.” 

Derek sighs and buries his head in the pillow, body further relaxing in a fascinating way Stiles has never seen it do before.

The werewolf then breaks his reverie by countering, “Sounds like a you problem.” 

And then Stiles laughs, biting down on Derek’s bicep in retaliation. They don’t get up for another half hour, and he makes a point to get to the Hale house later than everybody else. 

**Third step**

There’s a song by The Cure he’s got stuck in his head, it goes, _Sunday always comes too late, but Friday never hesitates._ It plays in the coffee shop on Lander Street where he’s writing the first few lines of his code, but Python felt like crashing his piece of shit laptop for the third time since 10AM and he’s got the headache to go with his overcaffeinated buzz. 

_Thursday I don’t care about you, it’s Friday I’m in love. Monday you can fall apart…_

A text buzzes in his phone, and he checks it to see Scott asking him if he’s seen the Lost DVD he left at Stiles’ bedroom literally eight fucking years ago. Further down his unopened messages is an angry text from Lydia he received when she caught wind of him taking a gap year and basically broke their pact to graduate a year earlier than their peers, his dad telling him he’ll be on double shifts all week, and one from Derek asking him where he is. 

He notes the time stamp and snorts when he sees it was sent two hours ago, Friday, 4:32 PM. 

**_You - 6:45 PM_ **

_ > At Lucky Brews. Can I come over? _

It’s definitely Friday, but he’s not in love. They haven’t exactly talked about it, preferred trading unspoken messages through casual touches instead. Derek will walk him out doors and pull him into kisses, and sometimes it feels like Stiles’ teeth could ache from how sweet it is, all up until the werewolf pulls another asshole move and forgets he exists for days on end before they see each other again. But then Derek will send annoyingly contrite texts, and Stiles swears each time he’s not going to play this game, _he didn’t sign up for it._ But fuck if he still always picks up the phone anyways.

**_Derek - 6:47 PM_ **

< _Yeah._

_ < Staying over? _

**_You - 6:47 PM_ **

> _convince me?_

**_Derek - 6:49 PM_ **

_ < Stay over. _

**_You - 6:51 PM_ **

_ > lol why do i even try with u _

He feels like a booty call even though they haven’t had sex again since the first time. Derek would invite him back, he’d pretend to put up a fight and look busy, but hook, line, and sinker, he’d drive over to the loft and take his shoes off with every intention to stay awhile. He’d come armed with food, sometimes with old DVD’s from his mother’s collection because Derek owns a CD player and not a streaming subscription like a fucking heathen. 

It’s when they’ve settled into each other’s presence that they trade touches: a hand on the waist when Derek passes him, hip checks Stiles takes glee in annoying the older man with, and they even woke up with their heads on top of each other on the couch twice. Each time, Stiles feels a little braver, a little more inclined to believe that when his hand lands on Derek’s skin, it belongs there. 

And he’s not in love, he isn’t, but it _is_ Friday. So he packs up his disaster of a Python project, gets his coffee poured in a cup, and he drives over to the loft in record time. 

. . .

Derek has him pinned to the bed before he could even get his mouth on him. 

He wasn’t sure at first if sex was on the table, but it was, and the table is served with Stiles being picked apart by Derek Hale while he’s got one shoe on and another missing, left somewhere inside the loft along with the last scrap of his self-control. Everything about him stands at attention with Derek - his cock, his consciousness, the nerves located on his lips that get stung by the rasp of stubble. 

“Can I fuck you?” gets whispered in his ear and Stiles says, “ _Yes,”_ because there’s no other answer he thinks he could give.

Derek pushes him to land on the pillow - silver, this time - the way he seems to like to do. Stiles’ head hits the headboard, and his apology is given to him by Derek moving swiftly down and taking Stiles’ hard cock in his mouth. And then he’s on _fire_ , he must be, because what else is there other than the incredible heat of Derek’s mouth enveloped around him? But then maybe that metaphor is a little wrong in this instance, a little morbid and weird where Derek is concerned. So he stops thinking about metaphors and starts pulling at the hair on the back of Derek’s head like it’s his only life line. Were blow jobs always supposed to have felt this transcendental? 

Derek pull off of him with a wet sound before reaching way over to retrieve the same bottle of lube they used the last time from the end table. 

“How do you want this?” 

“I’m good this way,” Stiles answers, letting his breath blow on the bunched muscles of Derek’s stomach where he’s still hovered over him. 

Derek’s eyes look molten when they catch his gaze, stays there, and kind of forgets to let it go for a while. Stiles hesitantly pulls him down for a kiss, tasting again the freeze-dried coffee Derek likes to drink in the afternoons. Their tongues meet and slide and it feels a lot like melting into each other in a way Stiles has never considered kissing to be like. But he does now, and he learns he likes the feeling of Derek pressing into him so solidly, so warm that he’s already sweating into the newly turned-over sheets and losing track of whose limbs belonged to who. 

They kiss for so long that that’s how the older man fingers him, with his mouth completely occupied enough to zone out from the burning stretch Derek’s working into his hole. He gets scissored to the sound of wet kisses and wet lube and it’s so fucking dirty he wants to come right then and there, but he doesn’t, he _won’t_. He wants to come with Derek inside of him, and he wants to see how Derek looks when his inner walls clamp down on his cock all through his climax. He wants this so much it doesn’t take a long while until they’re at three fingers, and he’s feeling the sweet brushes against his prostate with every other crook of a finger. 

He’s so, _so_ ready by the time Derek presses against his prostate teasingly but immediately pulls his fingers out to put on a condom. And finally, _christ, finally_ Derek enters him, and his entire body stills.

The length gets pushed in inch by aching inch, careful and steady and daunting to take in in its entirety. But he does it, and he’s so full he has to skip a few breaths in favour of adjusting to the intrusion up his ass. He reaches down to jack himself off, trying to loosen his body. Derek is breathing so deeply the sweat on his chest catches the light as it rises and falls. 

“I’m good,” Stiles says in a single breath, and Derek holds on to his hips before pulling out and then pressing back in just as slow. He groans at the feeling of being so slowly filled. He feels it like a ghost hand closing around his throat, pushing against his breath and driving him to chase down something intangible -- oxygen, an orgasm, both melding into a single need. His hands find purchase on the meat of Derek’s shoulders, gripping tight with every shove the older man makes inside of him. 

“ _Ah,_ ” is the punched-out sound that stutters out of him almost in tune with the staccato of Derek’s pace while he fucks into him. He feels it light up inside his body when they finally find their pace, their hips meeting with dull sounds, skin hitting skin and bone nudging against bone. 

“'Feel so fucking good,” Derek grunts with his eyes screwed shut, blissed out and nearly mindless with the angle in which he pushes in and in and _in so deep_ Stiles feels it up to his throat. And he thinks if he could spend the rest of his days being fucked by Derek Hale, he wouldn’t have to be so confused all the time anymore. Just certain, so completely certain that whenever that text arrives he’ll have a bed to warm and someone to take care of his coming apart.

“Yeah,” he agrees, fisting his dick tightly like he’s wringing out his pleasure. It hurts in the best way, coupled with the roughness the werewolf was handling him with. Derek eventually _gets there_ though, and the first hit to his prostate almost makes him want to sob. Derek notices this immediately, and with an unforgiving drive to push him over the edge, the older man pistons his hips bruisingly over and over against Stiles’ prostate, and with a toe-curling cry, his spine bows off the mattress as he comes for what seems like an endless moment where his pleasure is suspended between the time it took Derek to come inside of him and the time it takes for them to ride out both of their orgasms together. 

He’s not sure if he whited out a little, but when he comes to, Derek’s already wiping them both down, even cleaning Stiles between the cheeks. He does away with all his hesitation when the werewolf sinks into bed with him, and they entangle themselves in a slow, sloven manner. He’s got his head pillow on Derek’s chest and it’s not comfortable really, but it feels good to stretch his leg across Derek's thigh.

He’ll deny this later, because falling asleep right after sex without basking in the afterglow was lame as all hell, but the moment Derek wraps his arms around him, he was three seconds away from well and truly conking out.

. . .

Stiles couldn’t remember the last time he went stargazing. It used to be every night since the summer of seventh grade, nights spent sneaking up on his house’s rooftop and counting all the constellations he could find. It was never very many, even if Beacon Hills County was in the less polluted part of California. He liked to think of himself as a wayfinder sometimes, navigating in his head the veins of his little town by remembering which landmark was closest to which stars. 

He knows Canis Major umbrellaed the high school and the hospital, East of his point of origin. Everything else followed: Cassiopeia over the ice cream shop in Lander Street, Andromeda signalling Lydia’s gated community not far from it. He’s in Hawthorne, and that means he’s under Orion. He’s out on the tiny balcony of Derek’s loft, and his phone tells him it’s 1 AM. The chill is near unbearable in his state of undress, but he woke up in sweltering heat from the furnace that he slept next to. 

He lets the wind nip at his skin as he considers all the reasons why he drove himself back home from San Francisco. At first it was just the homesickness, the feeling of his college dorm mattress being too thin and the way the mac and cheese around Berkeley could never hit the spot after a crap day like Rosie’s Diner did. But then it was the texts he’d receive from Erica and Scott, and eventually even Derek. At first it was all just general updates to keep him from worrying, which then turned into an increasingly worrying amount of supernatural incident reports nearing the end of the semester. He honestly doesn’t understand why for someone so completely in distaste of the world they’re living in, he can’t for the life of him live anywhere else. Not in that college town where the monsters were professors who lose papers you stay up 35 hours for and douchebags at frat parties, and definitely not in his shoddy dorm that springs leaks every few days from god knows where.

It probably had a lot to do with the constant feeling of being unsafe, like he’s got a target painted on his back and he just kept waiting to be pounced on by the next supernatural thing. It didn’t take him long to finally stop ignoring the itching under his skin and admit to himself that safety was inside his childhood home. Safety was his father’s service gun, tucked away in his work belt under the bed frame. Safety was Scott’s house, always only going to be one mile away. Safety was Derek, listed third in Stiles’ speed dial contact list, never failing to pick up at the first ring just in case it was a life-or-death call.

So he left Berkely, turned in his LOA and drove back down to safety. It made Scott and the pack happy, and his Dad confused but accepted his news of taking a gap year well enough. But safety is not always safe; you can find one on every gun. That’s what Andrea Gibson says anyways, _I am just aiming to do better._

He feels a presence come up from behind, and he tears his eyes away from the sky to turn his head back. 

“What are you doing?” asks Derek, stepping out the balcony with squinted eyes and odd creases on his cheek, evidence from where he forgot to take off his watch last night. 

“Watching Orion.” 

“Who?” 

Stiles laughs softly and gestures him to come closer. 

“That’s Orion,” he points to the broken-up group of stars that make up the constellation. “Orion, meet Derek.” 

The werewolf looks nonplussed. “You’re talking to a star?”

“No, I’m just watching it. Haven’t you ever gone stargazing before?” 

Derek shakes his head and yawns, hiding it behind his palm. “The moon always looked better.” 

“Predictable,” Stiles teases, “but you gotta admit stars _are_ prettier.” 

Derek sidles up next to him, looking up with slight confusion written on his face. “I wouldn’t know how to start spotting a constellation. There’s too much up there.” 

“You kinda have to know what they look like off the internet first or something,” Stiles starts and points to Orion again, “We know that’s Orion because it looks like an archer with a bow. It’s also known as the Hunter.” 

Derek raises an eyebrow at him and says, “You really wanna start off with that?” 

Stiles realises the jab and throws his head back to laugh mirthfully, “Shit, yeah, that's a bad example.” 

“Not the best,” Derek agrees, but there’s the tiniest tugging on the corner of his mouth. 

They’ve got their forearms rested on the wrought-iron ledge, overlooking Hawthorne’s neighborhood that's near the Preserve. The town on this side sleeps like this: quiet and exhaling along with the brisk winds of May. He shivers in his thin shirt and tries to steal Derek’s warmth by pressing their arms together. 

“I don’t think I’m ever going to stop wishing on stars.”

“Not real.” 

Stiles gives him the side-eye and reminds him, “Half this town is some sort of supernatural creature. You don’t get to say shit like that.”

Derek shrugs his shoulders and tells him, “Just never really believed in it. Do you have a favourite one?” 

“You mean constellation?”

“Yeah.” 

Stiles looks up thoughtfully for a moment. “Probably the Big Dipper. Just because everyone knows it, and it was Scott’s favourite constellation since it was the only one he could ever make out. You do know what the Big Dipper looks like, right?” 

“I guess,” Derek mumbles, “never really paid attention. They look the same to me.” 

“They’re _really_ not, though. They’re like, the sky’s moles. Each one is different from the other.”

“Sure, just like yours.”

“ _Exactly._ ”

“They’re all named ‘dumbass’.” 

Stiles jostles his shoulder in retaliation and chuckles, “Dick.” 

“Come back to bed when you’re done with Orion,” Derek punctuates with another yawn. He squeezes Stiles’s shoulder before moving away and taking all the warmth in the balcony with him. 

Stiles hesitates.

Tonight, he wishes he could be braver. He wishes he could have stayed in college and that he could hire a therapist who could handle unpacking the trauma of every close encounter with death he’s had so far, and more so the crippling fear of losing the people he loves. He wants to talk about how it felt when they almost lost Erica and Boyd only to get them back looking like they had aged a century since. He wants to talk about Scott and Allison’s dysfunctional relationship and the abandonment issues this has inadvertently cropped up in him. He wants to bitch about Derek’s closed-off personality, his father’s health issues, the fact that his mom died before anyone was ready to lose her. 

But maybe, he’s a little ungrateful. Maybe it’s enough no one else has died since then and that all he has to deal with is keeping everyone alive. Maybe it’s enough that he has Lydia’s faith in him, his father’s unwavering support, Scott’s constant presence in his life, and this weird little arrangement with Beacon Hills’ apex predator. Maybe he should be thanking his unlucky stars. 

When he crawls back into the sleep-warmed mattress, Derek pulls him close to his chest. 

Stiles whispers in the dead of night, “Thank you for staying alive.” 

Derek cracks an eye open to regard him with sleep-clouded interest. “Thanks for coming back.” 

And he wishes, for once, for safety to really mean _safe_. 

. . .

**Fourth step**

He gets a job at the Beacon Hills Library three days after Derek stops talking to him. 

To be fair, it’s not like they’re dating. They're not, cross his heart, it’s just a series of trysts between two consenting adults and that’s that. It’s casual -- cool, even. Derek’s a good lay and he gets the tab most times when they order take out, and he doesn’t hog the covers like Stiles tends to do when he sleeps over. He’s not getting too fucked up about it. 

It should probably be weirder than it feels, to share a bed with his Alpha of four years and know him so intimately, in more ways than knowing Derek’s trauma with asshole women terrorizing his life, more than knowing what it feels to have Derek’s heart almost stop under his hands in the multitude of times they’ve fought at each other’s side; sometimes he zones out and catches himself just thinking about how he knows how Derek sounds mid-fuck by heart. It’s an intoxicating thought, is what it is. 

But he swears, on all the goddamn stars, that he’s not getting fucked up about this. And fine, maybe sometimes he’ll be the one to send the first text to Derek. A quick, _you free?_ or a straight-forward _wanna bone_ when he’s feeling extra trashy about his tact. But the thing is, Derek never says no, and sometimes this makes him feel guilty because what if Derek just doesn’t _know_ how to say no and Stiles is taking advantage of that? When he doesnt feel guilty, though, he’s feeling lucky, valued, fucking _handsome._ Sometimes he relishes in the thought that perhaps Derek never says no because he wants him, his time, his attention, his body. And being wanted by Derek Hale? Is _fan-fucking-tastic._

So he’s allowed to find it at least a little bit sucky whenever their spell breaks and they’re back to radio silence. He’ll take another Alpha pack before he admits to feeling pathetic about this, though. He’s fine. 

A beeping from his phone signalling a text makes his breath hitch. 

**_Dad - 12:46 PM_ **

**_> _ ** _How’s work going?_

Stiles feels his shoulders sag and the weight in his stomach settle back in. He leans back on his chair at the attendant’s desk and types out, _slow-going. Need me to bring you lunch?_ Dad brushes this off, and then he’s back to sitting impatiently in his chair while the library remains incredibly, mind-meltingly uneventful. 

So maybe getting a job at the Beacon Hills Library isn’t the best way to occupy his ADD brain. It had made sense at the time, though, when he saw the ad at the sheriff’s department and thought being a library attendant was exactly the kind of distraction he needed from a Derek-shaped pseudo-problem. He’s wrong, but it wasn't the first time he was. 

A thought crosses his mind. 

He picks up his phone and sends a text to Scott: 

**You - 12:53 PM**

_**< ** come w/ me to jungle tonight? _

**Scotty - 12:57 PM**

_**> ** sure bro. need a wingman? _

_ > tym? _

**You - 12:57 PM**

_**< ** kinda _

_ < i’ll pick u up @ 11? _

So maybe he just needs to get laid again by someone who isn’t, you know, Derek. It’s only rational to explore other options when you’re going through sexual withdrawals, right? 

It’s fine, they're fine. He’s chill, he's got this under control. But if he dives for his phone the next time it lights up, no one but Martha - his perpetually sleepy co-worker - could have witnessed him throwing it at his keyboard in frustration. 

. . .

_“This was a great idea!”_ Scott shouts over the pounding base, a pink cocktail in hand sloshing precariously over the salted rim. " _Aren't you having fun?!"_

Stiles was not having fun. 

He's tired, sweaty, and he hasn't got a goddamn lick of alcohol in his system since he challenged himself stupidly to only get drunk off of drinks strangers will buy him. But they've been in Jungle for two hours and Scott's the only idiot having fun, and he's even live-updating Allison about all the free drinks he's receiving while Stiles glares at the dance floor filled with people _not_ asking him out. 

He doesn't get it. He's not exactly _unattractive._ He's got Derek to vouch for him on that, alright? And see, there he fucking goes again, turning every meandering thought into passive-aggressively bringing Derek into it like he just can't help himself from being dumb and pathetic. 

Stiles runs a hand through his gelled hair, shooting a weak smile at Scott. "I'm gonna head to the bathroom for a bit!" 

_"What?!"_

He mimes splashing water on his face and Scott gives him a dimpled smile and two thumbs up to send him off on his way through the sea of partying individuals. 

He doesn't actually want to go to the bathroom. He wants to be random and reckless, to find a body to grind against that doesnt feel so big and way too-warm, to kiss someone without the trouble of stubble burn marring his skin after. 

He surveys the scene, squinting through the strobe lights and his hands lock onto someone's body, a stranger with dark hair and dark eyes and he says, "Dance with me," and they do. 

Stiles tries to lose himself in the feeling of abandon, of not giving a shit if dark eyes thinks it's okay to mouth at his neck and suck a hickey there where it's so rudely visible. He tries to zone out when there's two hands cupping his ass and pushing it against a stranger's hips, but Stiles turns his head to the side before dark eyes could plant a kiss on his mouth. 

He says, "Do you want to get out of here?" 

And Stiles says, "Okay," because he's tired, and he's sweaty, and he just wants to not feel so goddamn unwanted tonight. 

He texts Scott to call an Uber and leaves in his Jeep with, " _Tom_ , my name is Tom. And you are?" 

"Stuart." 

He sneaks Tom in his childhood bedroom because Dad was working too-long shifts anyways so it doesn’t matter if they don’t even try to enter the house quietly. It didn't matter if Stiles caught his heel on the bedframe and yelped as he and Tom fell onto his box-spring mattress, laughing loudly, palming at each other's hard-ons through identical pairs of tight jeans. It doesn't matter if he lets Tom undress him so quickly his skin pebbles in the midnight chill with only the heat of Tom's mouth providing reprieve. He gets kissed all over, everywhere but on the mouth. Tom gets close though, so close while he gets them both off and tries to latch onto Stiles' lips when he comes into Tom's calloused hands. 

It doesn't matter if Tom looks at him weird for this, for letting a guy touch your entire body but refusing to let him kiss you where it is easiest to.

When Tom collects his items, says, "I had fun," and turns a blinding, blissed-out smile on him, Stiles turns his head to side as Tom leans in to peck him goodbye. 

And if you asked him, even for a thousand times, if it mattered that having sex with someone who wasn't Derek Hale made him feel hollow, he'll dig his heels into the Earth and tell you that doesn't matter either. 

. . . 

On Sunday, a run-in with five crazed omega nearly kills him. 

It’s a stupidly common occurrence to live up to your twenties in Beacon Hills and have a few scrapes with death, but the worst part is, it wasn’t the omegas that almost kicks his metaphorical bucket over, no, it’s him with his barb-wired bat staking out on top of a tree while Scott and Erica play whack-a-mole beneath him. 

He killed one of the omegas, hooked a sickening crunch to the side of its head, and he got swiped with a claw clean across his back for it by another. Stiles had to act fast before he could well and truly have been shred to ribbons, so he yelled for backup and climbed a Sycamore tree so fucking fast his fifth grade boy scout commander would have been proud. But see, blood loss is a frightening thing even with all the adrenaline pumping through his veins, and at best he was a decent tree climber, so he felt it - the all-consuming fear - when slowly, his grip on the bark’s chips whittled away and faltered along with his foothold on a precarious branch.

He sees Scott and Erica struggling to stave off all the ‘weres, knocking one after another, tackling and snarling until they finally get two more down. This, he thinks, would be the lamest way to die. The moment he falls stretches in his memory like pulled candy. He remembers hurtling towards a bed of rocks, of Allison screaming her arrival, of hoping his dad doesn’t find him bloody and broken again, and then -

And _then_ he’s being yanked out of the air and pulled towards a bed of moss. Derek’s eyes gleams so starkly red, the forest around them looks like it’s painted in greyscale. The alpha swoops in and he’s fast, he’s relentless, and he kills the omega that injured Stiles and then some. 

The altercation is over in a few seconds.

After, when they call Deaton to help them burn the bodies, Stiles is bandaged and ready to pass out. There was some pain-taking, a lot of refusing to go to the hospital, and for some reason, Scott and Allison had taken off together to get to Chris once they were sure Stiles wasn’t going to turn into a werewolf.

He felt abandoned, leaning on the side of his jeep, watching as Deaton’s car peels out of the dirt path and back onto the main road. Derek takes his keys from him and takes him home, even puts him in bed and tells him to take painkillers and to go to the hospital if an infection develops. 

He will always remember that, once he’s alone in his bedroom as the Sheriff sleeps on the other side of the house soundly, none the wiser that Stiles put his life on the line again for this god-awful town. He will remember how it felt for his world to whirl, his vision to fade to white, dull down to grey, and the flash of red that saved his life and spilled blood in revenge. He will remember the gut-punching feeling of realising that he’s done this enough times that it’s already protocol for everyone to do a quick check-up, a quick burning of carcasses, and to move on while Stiles still has all the bruising and none of the werewolf healing. 

He will remember his fall and how the world had stretched into panic, the dread tipping everything sideways, how the flowerbed looked next to the jagged rocks his head should have cracked open on, and then Derek had caught him. 

Derek had caught him. 

. . .

The wound on his back heals. Scott and Allison check up on him twice, separately and together on two different occasions. 

He’s not so lonely, he reminds himself. He is not that hurt.

No, really. He isn’t. 

. . .

So maybe he’s a lot more lonely than he initially thought. It’s weird to feel lonely when he’s so used to being alone in the first place. He’s an only child, and was socially inept up until he got snapped up by supernatural creatures and built a pack of them along the way. But in the light of the gibbous moon, a book on his lap dated all the way back from his high school reading list, and some indie song crooning from his iPod dock in the background, he feels so goddamn lonely it could take his breath away. 

It’s not difficult to have a chemical crash like this when you’re pushing twenty-one with the trauma of a war veteran. Sometimes he forgets his age and remembers instead all the times he’s had to send a prayer up to his mother to get him through one more fight alive. Back in Berkeley it was difficult to feel real, as if the version of him carrying on with life as a college student was a ruse he’s put up to compartmentalize the kind of life he lived in Beacon Hills. It just never felt right. He felt too big for that skin; too weathered, too sad. 

But what the fuck has he got to feel sad about, right? He’s lucky. They’re all still alive. His mother went as gracefully as she could. He could only hope to be as graceful in trudging on with his life if only to honour hers. But that doesn’t stop him from mourning phantom ghosts that make him ache, like the option to have lived a life outside of danger, of the peace of mind that he won’t have to be so scared to be caught in another supernatural crossfire and not having to fear that he’s letting his life and his security and his youth slip away so fast. 

He’s sat by his windowsill, staring at the thicket of trees outside with rustling leaves that look busier than his entire social calendar. The loneliness, he reasons, is what spurs him to text Derek, _please come over._

He doesn’t put too heavy an expectation on his request because Stiles isn’t naive and hopeful. He left that part of him when Gerard tied him up and he had to endure the pain of a knife slicing through his body for hours long before help arrived. Help is created, asked for, _deserved._ He wants to deserve the help, wants to keep it close so it can pull his guilt up to the surface. Sometimes help comes in the form of a revelation, an uncovered fact that leads their little Scooby Doo gang to vanquish the next evil. Sometimes help is the siren of a Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department squad car. 

Sometimes help is just Derek texting back: _I’m on my way._

They meet for the first time in five days in the middle of the night, with a kiss that makes forgotten hope burst sweetly in his chest. Derek holds him almost in a cradle, with a gentleness that makes him feel like he’s rattling in the wind. They kiss, and they kiss and they kiss until Derek pulls back only to _say_ more than ask, “Someone else has been here.” 

And Stiles just whispers, "Yeah,” lets the confession hang in the air like a livewire, volatile and delicate.

Derek’s hold turns into a grip, a furrow in his eyebrows already forming into his trademark scowl. He looks like he’s about to say something in protest, but Stiles apparently has no concept of self-preservation because he goes ahead and says, “I’m not yours. You don’t get to be mad at me for that.” 

The werewolf exhales sharply, then moves in to trap Stiles’ right earlobe between sharp teeth. “Tonight,” Derek says, with a rumbling in his chest so powerful Stiles feels it in his bones, “Tonight you are.” 

And maybe he is.

Maybe, Stiles thinks, as their mouths meet and their teeth clack uncomfortably, maybe some part of him will always belong to Derek, to this sad excuse of an alpha. Sometimes Derek is the bane of his existence, but more often than not Derek is his salvation. And he hates it, he hates that Derek keeps trying to save everybody because this man has lost more than any one of them have, and seems to have dedicated the prime of his life fighting wars the murder of his family forced him to inherit. He hates the way Derek never caught a damn break in between the fire and the flood of misfortune that came after, and he hates himself for digging up half of Laura’s body then burying half of Peter’s all in the same year. 

The back of his knees hit the bed frame, sending something swooping in Stiles’ stomach when Derek breaks their fall with incredible reflexes and rolls them over. He tries to pour into the kiss his unspoken frustrations -- _I’m sorry you’re so hurt_ is said with his tongue fucking into Derek’s mouth, coaxing sounds out of the older man that sounds sinful enough to scare away their shared ghosts for one godless night. _I’m sorry I ever left_ is whispered into the skin of Derek’s chest where Stiles works on sucking bruises into it, broken capillaries that appear and fade just as fast the way Derek’s wounds always have, so frequent but so quickly gone that it’s incredibly easy to forget he hurts just the same as everyone else. But Stiles doesn’t forget that, he never has. He probably never could. He’s held Derek in his arms on the doors of death too many times to forget this man’s mortality. _And when death knocks,_ he leaves onto the planes of Derek’s abs as he kisses down all the way to mouth at his briefs, _we turn off the lights and pretend no one’s home._

He takes the entirety of Derek’s length and goes down on this man like it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do. This is how he drowns out his guilt, his hopelessness, the petty frustrations, and the fear of his life being shrunk into the lifespan of a mayfly; like he’s Gilgamesh and the focal point of this entire epic is plotted cleanly on the climaxes he and Derek chase together. And maybe this is dumb, the absolute-most- _wrong_ thing to anchor himself on to - the body of another, his pleasure in exchange for the pains of living, but it is -

“ _Fuck,_ Stiles your _mouth._ ”

It is _everything_ right now. Tonight. Where his lifespan definitely seems to have compressed to a mayfly’s cycle, and all there is is the cold and the monsoon outside his window, and his sun is the heat of Derek’s body, and all the stars point North to where he can easily duck up and stare into Derek’s face where it’s cracked open with wonder, looking back at him with hooded eyes like Stiles is the moon and the safety and the harbinger of hurt all at once. 

He knows that feeling very well. So he surges forward, pulls back, and pushes Derek over the edge with tongue and mouth, and when the werewolf’s hips jut forward as he comes, Stiles swallows his seed down even though he's always hated the taste of it. 

Stiles wants to come apart and suspend himself in animation. He wants there to be a truly infinite amount of seconds between _one_ and _two_ , where he can be reduced to nothing but a dot in the timeline, frozen, preserved, perfect. Because that’s what it feels to have Derek’s mouth take _him_ in, to have it pull precum and low groans out of him like this feeling of _good_ will never end for as long as they're joined like this. No concept of time, of start nor end. He doesn’t know what it is about Derek Hale and his propensity to make Stiles’ entire world shrink into a pinhole that only offers him on the other side of it. 

If people were tectonic plates, Stiles would move convergently - compressing into something else, breaking the seabed and gasping in his first lungfuls of air. And if tectonic plates were weather, Derek would be the forecast of an earthquake, leading Stiles into an orgasm that shakes them so strongly Derek has to hold him down as he trembles through the aftershocks. 

On the tip of his tongue, Stiles feels the words _I love you_ fighting to tumble out. His tongue is wrong, though, it must be. Just a spur of the moment sort of fluke. He ignores it, but as his eyelids flutter open, he cannot ignore the sight of Derek looming over him, green-grey eyes bled out with ruby red. It tugs at something in his chest, something that feels like devotion; something awfully like, _I would destroy worlds for you, too_ Because he’s Derek and he’s done that for his pack before, and Stiles is Stiles, and he promised himself he wouldn’t get fucked up over this, but he’s pretty sure he’d lay waste to cities to save Derek’s life if it meant having a repeat of this perfect moment, illuminated by the moon, witnessed by all his stars, where safety was between Derek's hands and hope is the feeling he left under the pad of Stiles' tongue.

Derek kisses him slow and sweet, though it tastes bitter. Stiles sinks into the mattress. 

In the stillness of the night, the creak of the bedsprings and the sound of his own heartbeat is their whole world. And then there’s Derek, telling him, “I missed you,” in that heart-achingly quiet tone of his, that always meant he was telling a truth half his heart just wasn’t ready to admit to yet. 

And here’s Stiles, and he is the pot, the kettle, and the colour black, so he doesn’t let himself sink claws into the dangerous way his pulse skips. Instead, he tells Derek, “You were better than the other guy.” 

He hears Derek scoff and a 200-pound werewolf crashes on top of him.

“ _Dude,_ get off.”

“I already did.” 

Stiles barks out a laugh and nudges Derek’s body until it’s laying next to his. Their hands find each other in the dark - stays there. 

Then Derek tells him, “The pack is getting suspicious.” 

“Of?”

“You, me. Us.” 

Stiles shrugs. “Let them. We don’t owe them an explanation.” 

“That’s not how Erica thinks and you know it.” 

“Fuck Erica.”

“She’d like that, so don’t actually.” 

Sometimes he can’t believe how funny Derek Hale is when no one else is looking. They laugh at the joke brazenly, and Stiles can’t pin down anything that sounds better than Derek’s laugh right now. He’ll try again tomorrow, when he isn’t sex-sleepy and drunk on the heady revelation that Derek got jealous over him. 

Tom has nothing on Derek.

“I work at the library now,” Stiles brings up and shifts to pillow his head on Derek’s chest. 

“The one near the hospital?”

“There’s seriously only the one.” 

“Okay.” 

“You should -” he interrupts himself with a yawn “- should visit it sometime.”

“Maybe,” gets muttered into the crown of his head. 

Stiles doesn’t feel hollow this time when Derek is the one kissing him goodnight, but he still hates the twinge in his gut when he wakes up to daylight filtering in through the window, his pillow on the floor, and the side of Derek’s bed glaringly empty.

. . .

**Fifth step**

The contact they have with each other in the following week gets reduced to three pack meetings and two hundred text messages.

Erica had eyed them both curiously the entire time they all met three days in a row with the Argents, due to Chris’ suspicions of a vampire nest cropping up in the preserve and seriously, what the _fuck._ But it’s not like Stiles had anything better to do, so he did the research and convened with what was left of his pack members who didn't leave for college on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Some four days later, they kill their Count Dracula clan with an array of blessed knives they had purchased from a priest in Oregon. 

It's all very anticlimactic, really. 

He brushes Erica's inquisitive looks off, and every time she so much as _hints_ at him and Derek smelling alike, he bumbles out an easy lie about hanging out more together as if he and Derek had this epic bromance going on behind the scenes that no one knew of.

He's only half wrong, see. 

But Stiles doesn't give a shit about Erica's suspicions, because lately Derek has stopped giving him radio silence between sex and started _texting him back._ If he could, he'd frame one entire text thread they exchanged where Derek told him a joke. An honest-to-goodness joke that was totally at his expense but fuck you, _Derek Hale texted him a joke._

It was a thing of beauty. 

Their continuous texting is the only thing that's getting him through a slow Friday at the library, where the week-ender party is definitely _not_. He's narrating Martha's sleep schedule to Derek (one half-hour nap before and after lunch) when the man himself shows up at the reception desk. 

He looks so good in a forest green pullover Stiles has to take a second to adjust to the sight. 

“Hey, what - why doing. _Wait_ , fuck. Words. Hi.” 

Derek places him with an amused smile, curling charmingly at the corner of his mouth, but then seems to catch himself and clears his throat, schooling his face into something that looks more like his familiar disgruntled look.

“You told me to come by. I brought -” he raises one hand carrying a takeout bag from Rosie’s “- lunch.” 

Stiles doesn’t respond immediately, gaze transfixed on Derek and his brown paper bag, looking incredibly out of place in Stiles’ workplace. 

“Got time?” Derek nudges. 

He looks to the side where Martha’s taking her pre-lunch slumber, so he doesn’t, actually, but Fridays at the library can deal without him for an hour. 

“Yeah, I’ve got time.” 

They hide away in the children’s story time section, secluded amongst the cubby holes and the crates of toys. Derek looks hilarious wedged between a tower of Mother Goose picture books and the craft table they eat their salad and chicken wrap on. This isn’t the first time they’ve shared a meal together, but it’s the first time they’ve eaten outside of the loft and in partial-public. It makes Stiles nervous, enough for him to clumsily tear off the paper on his wrap and drop bites of lettuce on the front of his shirt. Derek jokes that he looks like he belonged here and that they should get him a bib, and Stiles throws a tomato chunk at his head for it. 

When his self-timed lunch break is up, Derek bags their trash, kisses him goodbye, and leaves Stiles stunned senseless. 

A dam inside him seems to crack, and all of a sudden he feels like he could swim in this newfound tenderness between them.

Something better than being text buddies with Derek Hale, apparently, is having him come by work every other day bringing food and leaving with an affectionate gesture. Once, on the slowest Friday of his life, Derek blew him in between the shelves of the Literature and Geography section, making his brain dribble out his ears and onto a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. 

He gets to return the favour not long after, sunk down to his knees on the blood-red carpet, committing all sorts of sacrilege in the Religion section, where it’s exciting and not as well-hidden (Stiles suspects Martha saw glimpses of them but just couldn’t be bothered to step in). Stiles never passes up the opportunity to make Derek tremble, to hold this unbreakable man in his hands and feel him crack open and spill all over where Stiles can collect Derek’s pieces, if it means he gets to keep them safe. He’s no Jennifer, no Kate, no Braeden. He wants to burn the memory of them out of Derek’s mind because he _hates them_ , hates them like he hasn’t hated anyone else before, just because he couldn’t pin the blame of the maelstrom of their life on anyone else. 

Even with his mouth stuffed full of cock, Stiles turns up watery eyes at Derek and wonders, once again, why half of California wants to kill this man. Once upon a time he himself wanted to put Derek behind bars just because he was afraid of him, but now Stiles just constantly fears _for_ him. Because this werewolf’s self-sacrificing streak spans the entire length of the equator, and who does he have? Who looks after this man who tries to look after this entire town? Not Peter, that’s for fucking sure. 

Stiles had planned all this time to leave and start a life away from Beacon Hills’ rising death toll, a plan not even his father could have kept him away from, but there is something so mind-scrambling about the way Derek grips his throat to pull his cock out of Stiles’ mouth just so he could drag him up. He kisses Stiles’ swollen lips so good and deep that this feels more important than escaping - the kind of kiss that changes minds - and he just opens his jaw a little wider, pulls Derek even closer, and he thinks, _where would we be now if we weren’t together._

He would’ve been miserable in his college dorm room, nursing bottles of cheap beer and looking over his shoulder every ten seconds. Derek would probably be dating someone who would take him out in his sleep. 

And that just won’t do. 

He’s kind of forgotten what it’s like to not know Derek so intimately. It’s a side-effect of saving and fucking each other, he supposes. Sometimes at the same time, in his case, ‘cause Stiles can’t remember the last time he felt like he’s carved a place for himself like he has in Derek’s loft, in the nooks and crannies of the library, the way he hasn’t felt in high school or Berkeley or even in the pack. 

He knows this is dangerous. He gets it. He shouldn’t fall in love with people who are as jaded as Derek Hale is. But he trips on everything, it’s a hallmark of his personality - air, dining tables, his own heart. He trips and he misses the landing altogether, and instead hurtles down straight into the territory of _dumb, thoroughly deep,_ and _no turning back._

But Derek has always caught him, hasn’t he?

. . .

More supernatural creatures come to wreak havoc from left, right, and the ugly centre: belligerent gnomes and skinwalkers and other freaks of nature that threaten to kill them. Spoiler alert: they don’t. 

Stiles gets tired and worn down but fuck if he didn’t feel _alive._ This is his life, engraved in blessed knives, told through circles of mountain ash, and the days are seized with the will to protect this town. It’s a conflicting feeling, hating this and thriving on it at the same time. He’s heard about adrenaline junkies speak of fear like this before, like it’s something special and feels inexplicably riveting in their veins. 

When they slay a Bukavac, Stiles was the one to strike it in between the eyes. He got sent to the hospital for that one for a week, but the library gave him a paid leave and Derek frequented his room so much his father had asked him if Derek was guilty of something.

_(“No, Dad, god why can’t you speculate about my dating life like a normal person would?”_

_“Well, should I?”_

_“No!”)_

So he supposes it was still a hell of a win.

More often than not he goes home to Derek’s loft, melting from bone-deep exhaustion and counting his fingers to check if they’re all there and that it meant they really did survive another attack. Three times, he and Derek had kissed with blood still splattered all over them, and it had been disgusting but sort of weirdly hot and anchoring in the way that it had felt like it was the realest thing in his life right now - the two of them, someone else’s blood on their clothes, their heart beats a reminder that it’s still them who gets to be alive when all is slayed, said, and done. 

But occasionally it gets unbearable, because see, Stiles gets nightmares: these panic attacks that hijack all his systems and tell him _you’re_ _going to die,_ and it’s embarrassing at worst, but he’s just twenty-one, Derek is twenty-something, and no one is built to store this much trauma and not shake apart at the seams from time to time. It is the war _after_ the war (after the war after the war after the war…), but this time he lays down his weapons, folds his hands over his chest, just to make sure the hurt that’s trying to spill out of it stays there. 

Sometimes, on nights where sleep could not afford them peace, Derek will press his ear against Stiles’ left pec just to hear how loudly his heart beats inside it. On one occasion Derek had told him, “Every time I do this, your heart speeds up.” 

He never had the guts to admit to why at the time. So in lieu of an answer, Stiles had turned Derek’s head gently so their eyes met - his own monochromatic brown and the most confusing shade of heterochromic he’s ever seen, and he had told the older man, “Every time I do this, your pupils dilate.” 

On nights like those, when reality spins into something horrendous and the uncertainty of their lives grips them with fear, there is only _two_ truths that cannot long be hidden: that Stiles’ heart jackrabbits when they touch, and that Derek’s irises will get swallowed up by the focus it turns on him when they look at each other.

It’s stupid - _inane_ to take comfort in just this. He can’t describe it, the words escape him when he tries to explain why. But it's somewhere in the way Stiles slips out from the loft like a cheap fuck leaving before sunrise could damn him; the way they avoid each other's eyes at pack meetings and the constant thrice fold-showering before he could rub the smell of Derek out of his skin. But sometimes he feels like it’s all he'll ever want to know: the thrill of being shoved in between places like he's a well-kept secret, the constant precariousness of the line they're treading, and the quiet moments they handle with so much reverence, like it could shatter at the slightest touch. He likes to think his heart was an acrobat, his sanity the balancing act. 

And there is Derek, holding the other end of the tightrope that's keeping him afloat.

. . .

**Sixth step**

The enrollment season for the fall semester at Berkeley nags at him from the email on his laptop, aggressively bright and annoyingly encouraging. 

He should probably ignore it. 

“Stiles,” Derek calls his attention from across the tiny dining table. 

“Mhm?” 

“You do know you made two mugs of coffee and haven’t touched either of them,” he points with a butter knife to one blue and one orange ceramic mug in front of Stiles, both filled to the brim with dark roast. 

So maybe he’s a little distracted this morning. 

“I seem to have, yeah,” Stiles mumbles, swiping his fingers on the laptop trackpad to exit Gmail and put off the forthcoming existential crisis. Derek has other plans, though. 

“What’s wrong?” 

Stiles wraps his hands around the blue mug’s surface, the first coffee he apparently made by the way it felt lukewarm to the touch. “Just, stuff. College.”

Derek levels him with an unimpressed look because no matter how taciturn he can get nowadays, Derek _will_ find a way to say even less than him. 

Stiles runs a hand through his face and sighs. “I think I should go back to Berkely.”

“Then go,” Derek says flatly, like it’s that easy. Like it’s okay for Stiles to just drive back to San Francisco and leave his heart in this town where it’s already taken root before he could stop it. 

“It’s not that simple,” he starts carefully, dissecting the next words he wants to leave his lips. “I left Berkely for a reason. I don’t think I want to go back just yet, but I sort of...think it’s time I do. But I don’t like that, so, there. Problem of the century.”

“It doesn’t sound like it, though,” Derek says surprisingly, “It sounds like you’re making excuses not to get a move along your life.”

Who the _fuck_ showed Derek Hale the key under the mat to his brain? Not Stiles, that’s for sure. 

Derek ploughs on, “You’ve thought about this, that’s just who you’ve always been. There’s never been a situation you couldn’t research or talk yourself out of. You left Berkely because you knew what was good for you, and now you’re thinking of going back for the same reason, just under different circumstances.”

Stiles stares at him. 

Apparently somewhere along the way, Derek has done more than map out the moles on his skin. Somewhere along the way he had well and truly understood Stiles and _Stiles didn’t know how to feel about that._

“Uh,” is the intelligible thing he says. 

Derek only takes a bite out of his incredibly bland raisin bran cereal, because that’s just the kind of person he is. The silence stretches and being called out like this makes Stiles want to fill it with excuses and words to prove Derek wrong; that _no_ he doesn’t know Stiles as well as he thinks, he’s not running away, he’s not that self-aware, he isn’t. 

“What’s keeping you here, Stiles?” 

Stiles takes in the slant of worry along Derek’s eyebrows. He swallows, and the only answer he could come up with is, “You.” 

A spoon clatters on the bowl. 

Derek frowns. “That’s...not the right answer.”

Stiles shoots him a quizzical look. “But it’s mine. You can’t tell me what the right answer is when it belongs to me.” 

“No,” Derek counters, pushing his bowl away like that gesture could keep Stiles’ truth at bay. “You’re - no. That’s not you. You never let anyone get in the way of what you want, not even fucking death itself, Stiles.” He pauses. “You need to leave.” 

“What?” Stiles feels his stomach starting to creak on its hinges and threaten to fall, one blow of breath away to jolt him into full-fledged panic. 

“You need to do some thinking. You being here won’t help that.” Derek gets up from his chair to collect Stiles’ flannel jacket from where it’s thrown over the couch. He goes ahead and scopes out Stiles’ other belongings that are scattered about the loft: his keys on the clam shell ashtray near the rolling doors, his cellphone charged in the bedroom, the earphones he thought he had lost weeks ago wedged in the seat of an armchair. All the while Stiles watches Derek do this, marching around like a man on a mission, except all the mission heads towards is getting rid of him, and it makes his blood run cold.

When Derek comes out of the bathroom with the extra bottle of Adderall he’s taken to keeping a stash of at the loft, Stiles breaks his stunned silence and calls out in panic, “What are you _doing?”_

Derek doesn’t answer him, just checks the expiry label on the bottle and tucks it inside Stiles’ jacket after. 

“Derek, what the fuck are you doing?” Stiles demands as he rises shakily from the chair and steps forward into Derek’s space, hands scrambling to grip at the front of the werewolf’s Henley in his fists. “Stop, you’re overreacting -”

“You’re not reacting _enough,”_ Derek says firmly, “you’re not thinking straight and that’s - that’s probably my fault. I kept you here. I fucked you into staying and that’s on me, that’s not your fault.” 

“The _fuck_ do you mean by that? You fucked me into staying? Do you think I can be manipulated like that?” Stiles says with anger shaking his body. “I made that decision, _I stayed._ ”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“ _That’s not your decision to make!”_

Derek removes his hand from the bunched material of his shirt and trudges back to the dining table, rolling Stiles’ belongings in the jacket in a flimsy attempt to solidify Stiles’ leave from the loft, this town, maybe even his life. And it’s not fair. It is not fucking fair. 

“ _Fuck you_ , Derek Hale,” he spits out, his hands balled shakily at his sides. “It’s _one thing,_ one awful fucking thing to kick me out of your place but you have no fucking right to tell me I’m doing my life wrong.”

“Someone has to.” 

“And you think that’s _you?_ ”

Derek rounds to face him. “Yes. Because apparently I have to. Apparently I have to tell you that you were supposed to be smarter than this.” 

“Oh fuck off!” 

“I will, just give me a chance to.” 

The defeat in Derek’s voice seizes his chest, like that’s it, that’s what Derek really thinks is the right course of action. Like Stiles would be better off without him, without this little bubble they’ve created for themselves where Stiles has _finally_ set up camp and lit the hearth in. 

His voice feels seven different types of strangled when he closes their distance and says, “I love you.”

Derek’s expression cracks and falls to reveal something so heartbroken it makes his head spin. Stiles scrambles to wrap his arms around Derek, holds on to him like this could keep them both together. He remembers this was how Derek used to look at him, all the way back to the first time they ever kissed. Like he’s just a heartbreak waiting to happen. Like it’s _already_ happened. 

“ _Stiles_ ,” is whispered into the back of his neck, a sound so soft he can barely tell apart a prayer from a name by the way Derek says it. 

“I don’t _want_ to leave for San Francisco. Not with you here.” He’s not crying, but the way his throat closes up makes it so easy to. Derek stood stock still in his arms. He’d give anything right now for Derek to touch him back.

But he doesn’t. 

Derek extricates himself from Stiles and pushes the bundle of his items towards him. Stiles takes it gingerly with his heart sunk down to his stomach.

“I’m not holding you back,” Derek says softly, “I can’t...don’t make me. You’re wrong.”

“I’m not making you do anything,” Stiles says with his voice only above a whisper. “I’m not wrong.”

Derek looks down to where a keychain from Stiles’ keys has broken from the ring and fallen to the ground. It’s a miniature model of Canis Major he and Scott had gotten last year. 

The older man rests his forehead against Stiles’, and when he leans down, Stiles holds his breath for a kiss that never comes. Instead, Derek bends all the way down to his feet and picks up the broken piece of acrylic to hand it over. 

Stiles doesn’t take it. 

Later, Stiles will describe this feeling. He’ll have time to fold his hands over his chest the way he does, to make sure the hurt stays in and doesn’t drown him while he’s on dry land, cruising through the I-80 as he leaves Beacon Hills. For now he walks back and out of the loft, sparing not a single word in his haste to leave where he’s clearly extended his invitation. His foot catches on a dip in the concrete, and he seems to trip on everything these days, doesn’t he? The air, dining tables, his own heart, the truth. 

But this time, Derek doesn’t catch him. 

Derek doesn’t even try.

. . .

UC Berkeley during the fall is idyllic and bright. The entire campus is shrouded in trees with shockingly orange hues, painting the pavements in a sea of red that Stiles likes to part with his scuffed shoes and pretend he was Moses whenever he walks the leisure path to and fro his student dorm and Corey Hall. 

It’s a little bit easier to not feel so heartbroken when everything looks so beautiful. Just a bit. He’s sat by the windowsill of a coffee shop near South Hall, his still piece-of-shit laptop and a walnut cookie in front of him, and a considerable chunk of code with the cursor screaming at him to keep writing. There’s a coffee stain on his ring-bound notebook where his to do list says:

  * _Get laundry_


  * Call RA abt sink


  * Ask dad how 2 fix door hinge 



His dorm room still springs the strangest leaks, and his and Greg’s (his roommate with the big curly hair) next-door neighbours still don’t know how to turn down their music at 11PM like they should. He hates his RA, and he’s not doing so well in his Probability and Random Processes class, but it’s whatever, because he’s got Catherine from Robotics inviting him and Greg out for a string of parties that he gets drunk at for free. In fact there’s one in two days, and that’s why he’s cramming homework into this free period of his because if he doesn’t find time to do laundry tonight, he might as well show up to class tomorrow in a bedsheet toga.

His stomach gurgles, and a voice in his head that sounds an awful lot like Dad reminds him that some sugar and a morself of carb cannot be washed down by caffeine and be called a meal. Stiles pushes off the little round table to order a flatbread with cheese. The barista still gets his name wrong, spells ‘Stiles’ with an unnecessary ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ even if he’s been coming here since freshman year. When he gets his plate, a student standing to the side of the counter clears their throat and tells him, “That’s my order.” 

Stiles looks at them, narrows his eyes because there’s a very small niche for baby names like _Stiles,_ and no rational person would spell their name like this cafe’s barista does his. 

“No, this is my order. I’m Stylez,” he explains, “except not really.” 

The student raises his eyebrow. “Stylez is my stage name. I ordered that thing around half an hour ago.” 

“I don’t believe you.”

“Rock-paper-scissors you for it?”

And that’s how he meets Adam. 

. . .

Adam is a slam poet. That’s what he tells Stiles on their first date. 

But it’s a friend date, not a romantic kind of date, and it’s a date that ends up with Adam tagging along with him and Greg to a Greek party that the god Dionysus himself would be disgusted with. There’s free-flowing vodka and white rum, a bubble machine that didn’t look like a good idea paired with very drunk people, and he thinks he sees a butt-chugging contest in the yard that he doesn’t really want to look into. 

Catherine and Greg have basically melted into the crowd, and so Adam and he find the INTEX pool filled to the brim with ice and sponsored beer on their own. Not even the raucous environment around them stops Adam from telling him of the poets that inspired him to pursue a degree in English Literature, just so he could spend years studying something he would have slaved over for free. Stiles wants to tell him he worked at a library for almost half a year, but the library and the memories it totes around with it make his eyes water, so he holds his tongue. 

Around them, the party is a rager. Whatever that meant. But that’s what Greg tells him with his breath smelling like he could whistle into a breathalyzer and burn a hole in it when they come across him only a few minutes later. Stiles dunks back beer after beer and accepts the shots being doled out by Alpha Phi’s ‘party officials’, and the _entire_ time Adam talks to him about poetry, literature, and why there is a poetic analogy for everything in the world including college frat parties. 

“Like, see,” Adam gestures to his solo cup half-filled with a mystery drink, “I could make a poem out of anyone’s eyes even if it was this colour.” 

The colour of the drink is radioactive green, so Stiles thinks Adam has had way too much to drink of it. 

“And yours!” The boy continues, “It’s, like, green. But not my kind of drink’s green. _Hazel?_ ”

It maybe sort of is. Though, no drink in the world should be the colour of hazel, but he’s not about to tell his poet friend that not all colours can be used with a poetic license. 

“Tell me you can’t think of one heartbreak that you can allegorize with your drink!” 

Stiles downs his cup in one chug so he doesn’t have to think about the indefinable colour of Derek’s irises. 

. . .

He kisses Adam sloppily on the way back to the boy’s apartment near campus, and Adam asks him, “ ‘You lookin’ for love tonight?” 

Stiles tells him, “No. Not anymore,” licking into Adam’s mouth and pressing him against his messy desk. He feels like he rides out half of his buzz just sloppily making out with his friend, no intention to get off but just to feel the nearness and intimacy of another body. 

Adam looks nothing like Derek, which Stiles prefers for all his future friendly make out partners. He’s got mousey brown hair and has one tattoo sleeve sitting on his incredibly tan skin. When he pushes Adam onto his bed, there’s no passion, no giddy feeling in his stomach that he shouldn’t be doing this. He should be. He’s almost 21, and he’s a college sophomore who’s supposed to drink too much to make make innocuously dumb decisions. Right now, he isn’t Stiles of the Hale Pack. He isn’t a young man sneaking away with his Alpha, celebrating a life lived but _barely_ making it out living.

It’s freeing, insanely _simple,_ to be just a college boy and having to survive in a completely different way. It feels like the exhale to the longest fucking inhale of his life. But he wonders, when he’s back in the quiet of his own dorm room, if that meant it was even worth breathing in for at all. 

. . . 

He kind of hates Adam sometimes.

They hang out frequently in the other boy’s apartment because they _can_ and Stiles doesn’t pass up opportunities to crash at places that’s, like, five thousand percent better than student housing. 

He hates him because Adam is a walking, talking reminder of his tragic love life. Adam is a _poet_ , and he doesn’t let anyone forget that. Much less Stiles, who he spends an inordinate amount of time getting baked with, making out after, and sometimes studying with. He’s every Valentine Hallmark card _on loop_ and Stiles is the poor bastard who gets a months’ supply worth of it. And Adam, ever the champion of bleeding hearts, had seen right through his immediately the day after the party at Alpha Phi. 

“You’ve got love that never _got_ to be fully loved, dont’cha?” Adam had asked him, with an impish smile that kind of made Stiles want to punch him.

Fuck if Stiles did. He had told Derek he _loved_ him before he was ready to, before Derek was allowed to hear it, before either of them were ready to say it and not end up throwing the other out of their lives the way Stiles was sent back to San Francisco with a broken heart and a new class schedule. 

Adam had exalted when he had found out Stiles listens to Andrea Gibson, the only poet he’s actually downloaded an entire album of spoken word poetry for. 

“ _Gibson,_ Andrea Gibson! I might have hope for you yet.”

They had listened to _Maybe I Need You_ that afternoon and just never stopped the playlist from continuing. And Stiles had been sprawled in Adam’s bed, his hands clasped together over his chest, just listening. He could hate Adam for reminding him of every rotten thing he’s felt since the not-break up. If he could describe it, it would feel like having the sun collapse in over his head, sudden and painful and left him floundering. Like the floor was taken from under his feet and the plywood was used to slap him across the face while at it. If Gibson would describe it, it’d sound like every sad poem of hers squeezed into one gigantic muddle of angst. And she had a _lot_. 

He could hate her for that, too, for making him feel everything so viscerally - from the ache in his chest to the cold that sits just under his skin that was never there back when he could easily leech off Derek's warmth. He could hate everyone not entirely involved in his manpain just so he won’t have to hate Derek Hale himself. Because he’s tried that before, see, and he just ended up falling in love with him hard. Like head-first, bone-deep, world-flipping kind of hard. The kind that leads him back to the same road even if he tried to meander off it, the kind that changed his mind and made him look through life through the _pinhole_ of their intimacy. 

He stopped wishing on stars when he started believing in Derek more. 

_Now it’s you, you absolute bastard,_ he had thought, staring up at Adam’s popcorn ceiling, listening to the cadence of Gibson’s voice, _you are my north fucking star._

Stiles liked to pretend he was a wayfinder when he was young. Now his compass is all awry, shattered and the gravity entirely shifted, and there’s no true north to map his way towards anymore.

_“Maybe I need you the way that big moon needs that open sea,”_ Gibson says, “ _Maybe I didn't even know I was here, until I saw you holding me.”_

_. . ._

The months feel like they click by, with August flashing into September and September flipping the calendar page at his desk into October before he could really take notice. Three major things happen during the course of two months of his sophomore year:

  1. He and Greg get into an epic fight with their loud neighbours in 32B. Stiles ends up getting them sanctioned by framing them for a microwave explosion in the common room. Greg now thinks of him as a god. 
  2. He fails his first Robotics exam but aces the rest of his classes. Dad was so proud he almost cried over the phone when Stiles told him about it. 
  3. Adam comes with him to a clinic the first time he gets an STD scare after his first one night stand since he left home. Turns out it was just a shaving rash, but Stiles had sworn to celibacy until monogamy since then. Adam wrote a poem about this and made their entire friend group listen to it during _Slam!(Poetry)_ night at Linetti’s Pizza and Jazz. 



He never got to fix their door hinge, but that’s fine, he hasn’t come around to fixing a lot of things yet since August. He’s gone to parties, made out with nameless faces, studied so hard and wrote lines of codes so long he forgets to tell apart Monday from Wednesday, until it’s Friday and Catherine’s beating down their door again for another party invite.

The weeks bleed into each other, and his life feels like it’s chugging along in one big movement, so busy and strangely mundane he doesn’t have a good grasp on the concept of time anymore. There is just the Before and After the start of his fall semester; before and after the _falling out_ of Fall. Adam would be proud of him for thinking in poetry. 

He wears his heartache on his sleeve and surprisingly because of this, he finds that he gets the support he needed all along. Today, he’s about to go in for the first counseling session Greg helped him schedule at the College of Environmental Design. He’s about to meet with Dr. Salvador at the third floor of Tang Center, a folded piece of paper in his pocket that has his speech written out with the edited version of his life’s problems. What can he say, he likes to come prepared. 

The counseling room is neither cramped nor roomy, just right, just enough to appear cozy and far from clinical. There are overgrown spider plants in three corners, and on the fourth is an orange bean bag chair where Dr. Salvador - he assumes - sits cross-legged with an inviting smile. 

“Przemysclaw Stilinski?” She inquires, pronunciation perfect, voice high and clear as a bell. 

“Just Stiles, thanks,” he corrects her as he enters the room fully, taking in the burgundy carpet and the unassuming leather couch he takes a seat in. “Mr. Stilinski is my grandfather.”

“Not your father?” 

“Nope,” he grins widely, “My father’s called the ‘Sheriff’.”

Stiles starts the 1.5 hour-session by asking Dr. Salvador if she sits on a bean bag at a lower angle than her clients to make them feel more comfortable. She tells him she just likes the floor. He spends a good ten minutes probing her about her job more, babbling a thinly-veiled psychoanalysis of the room, her demeanor, the colour of her clipboard ( _“Yellow because it’s cheery?”;”Yellow because that’s all they had at the bookstore.”_ ), the choice of using a mood light and not white for the bulbs.

“Sorry,” Stiles laughs nervously, rubbing his hands on his jeans where his leg bounces up and down, “I really shouldn’t be using up my time talking about you and the, uh, this room. Totally my bad. I promise I’ll do better next time.” 

Dr. Salvador shrugs good-naturedly, “Most people work through their thoughts from the shallowest end before digging deep. You’re doing fine, Stiles. I’m just glad you’re talking at all.” 

“It’s what I’m good at. My old lacrosse coach always said I should find a job that could pay me to talk off ears.” 

“Well I don’t know about that, but I do know I _actually_ get paid to have my ears be talked off.”

And it works. He unpacks his thoughts messily, the way he did the day he moved into his dorm room for the first time: sporadically and with no real system. He tells her bits and pieces of how certain things in his life make him feel constantly on edge without having to specify it as a supernatural kind of ‘certain’. He tells her about Lydia, and the self-esteem issues her name carries on a wheelbarrow that took him years to leave at the sand box along with the rest of his childhood traumas. He doesn’t talk about his mother. Stiles talks about his father, how he carries the worry on him like a badge that he can’t take off, unlike his Dad who gets to remove his at the end of a work day. 

He doesn’t talk about Derek. Yet. 

Before he knows it, it’s 5:15 PM and his time is up. Dr. Salvador has her yellow clipboard turned over and she’s getting up from her bean bag to walk Stiles out the door.

“See you next Tuesday, Stiles.” She waves after his retreating form.

He steps out of Tang Center, heaves in a great big breath of crisp fall air, and huffs it all out with a feeling of accomplishment. 

Today, therapy. Tomorrow, the damn door hinges.

. . .

(He still doesn’t know how to fix a goddamn door hinge.)

. . .

“Stiles, you’re _so_ not allowed to flake on me,” Adam crosses his arms and gestures for Greg to help his case. “When have you _ever_ missed Slam night? _My_ Slam nights? You love my poetry.”

“I do not love your poetry.”

“You lying whore!”

Stiles looks up from his laptop to his friends who are standing in his dorm room, looking at him expectantly. “I may be a whore, but I’m not a liar. I’m also super fucking behind on homework man, so just - like, _okay?”_

“No, I won’t just-like- _okay._ You’ve never missed my Slam nights! Are you sad again? Have you been missing your schedules with Dr. Salvador? I fucking _told_ you I’d know if you missed your appointments.”

“That was one time!” Stiles throws his hands up in protest. “And it was scheduled right _before_ midterms week. Greg, tell him I couldn’t even remember my own last name at the time. Tell him.”

Greg looks between him and Adam exasperatedly and sighs. “He couldn’t even remember his own last name at the time.” 

“ _Thank_ you!”

“Perfect! Then you’ll have no reason to hole up while the entire gang goes to Linnetti’s tonight, right? Right. Thanks, good talk.” Adam sweeps out of the dorm room before Stiles could protest his fuckload of homework, slamming the door shut just to make sure his distaste stays in the room long before he’s walked out. 

Stiles stares at Greg who just rolls his eyes. “He said he prepared something for you. Just humour him.”

“Yes, because that’s exactly the kind of excuse Dr. Goodall’s gonna accept once I turn in another code late. I went to _Slam_ night to listen to my friend’s shitty poetry.” 

“Hey, Adam’s got some good stuff.” 

“Whose side are you on?” 

“No one’s,” Greg throws a pillow over his face, muffling his next words, “Everyone is an idiot and I hate you all equally.” 

Linnetti’s that night is as packed as usual. Everyone and their mothers (no, seriously, there’s a huge market for middle-aged Italian women at this place) seem to love _Slam!(Poetry)_ nights and for all of Stiles’ whining, Greg wasn’t actually wrong, Adam does have a decent following with his spoken-word pieces. 

They’re at their regular table. Catherine is taking a video of Adam’s set to his left and Greg is flirting with the bartender to his right. Adam is on the stage just about to end a piece Stiles knows he crammed just two hours ago. 

The Italian mothers clap loudly after, and their friend bows theatrically with a sweeping gesture. “Alright,” he says into the mic. There’s feedback from the speakers that makes Stiles flinch. “This one is dedicated to my friend who stole my stage name. His isn’t spelled as cool as mine, but he’s my muse.”

The crowd wolf whistles and throws in teasing jeers, causing Stiles' face to flare up in embarrassment. 

“No, no! Not that kind of muse, sorry folks,” Adam clears up with his hands raised placatingly, “This one is tonight’s special, and my friend - not at _all_ boyfriend - had a big hand at inspiring me to write it. Stiles with an ‘S’ and an ‘I’,” he turns a quick look at him with a ridiculously-timed wink, “Go fuck yourself.” 

“Ah, friendship,” Catherine mutters.

“Can you believe I used to think these two were boning,” Greg supplies. 

The crowd quiets down. And then Adam starts -

“Not that you deserve it, but I forgive you.” 

There’s a weird moment, where everything drowns out and Stiles zeroes in on the emotion gripping him hard enough to hold his entire attention. 

“I don’t remember a door I’ve ever passed through that I hadn’t closed shut. It’s how you don’t let the warmth leave during winter, how you keep the music resonating in one room. It’s how you keep yourself protected when you're five, and monsters factually cease to exist once it’s clicked shut. It’s safety without being safe, the seclusion that dares intrusion.” 

He remembers saying these things to Adam, once when they were drunk and twice when they got high. Both times he was sick out of love, but he refuses to call it _lovesick,_ god, never that. 

(It is.)

“And I know this so well because there’s never been a lock that I haven’t taught myself how to break. There is no foundation that I’ve known to be too impervious to shake - I’ve never known constancy like I’ve built my relationship with change.” 

Adam talks like he’s speaking through the lid of Stiles’ hurt, and maybe he was. Maybe Stiles has talked too much when he always prided himself in trying to talk as little about it - _it,_ the big It. The one that took five sessions at Tang Center before he could finally talk about It in all its ugly entirety. 

“Never even seen myself keep promises the way I've known to break all of them. You’ll never hear a lie from me that wasn’t spun to be the slightest bit true. So not that you deserve it, but I think I’m going to forgive you.” 

He said this, almost-exactly this, in a voice message he never had the courage to send, after a particularly rough Programming practical exam that was immediately followed by an equally rough night of drinking. The phone was there, and so was Derek’s contact, still highlighted with an unread message from the man dated back in July that read: **did you get there safe?**

Safety, as he’s said before, has always been relative. 

“It took me ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall to finally be convinced that I’ve got ninety-nine problems, and somehow, you’re worth all fifty of them, baby; through no fault of your own but mine, because the one time I left the door open for you, I hadn't counted on you to slam it shut. Because not that I deserved it, but I was waiting for you to come in. On that day, I learned what they say about taking a punch to the gut.” 

Oh fuck you, Adam. Fuck you. 

“Apparently everything in this world is fallible. Even gravity can’t be everywhere; it wasn’t there when I knew I had fallen in love, and I know this because it took me ten seconds, and then the rest of forever, to reach rock bottom. Your depths always got in the way. It was always like leaving a door ajar with you, and I never got to make myself a key before you changed all the locks. I stayed in suspension with bated _fucking_ breath for so long I had forgotten to breathe at all.” 

There’s a stinging behind his eyes that he doesn’t care for, not in the middle of a goddamn pizza salon that hosts jazz nights on Mondays and poetry readings on Sundays. 

“And it’s so backwards to lose air when I never closed that door. I always let the light in, along with the air, the cold, and the hope you’d walk right in, just in time to catch me during the fall.” 

He brings out his phone to stare at the still-unread text. There’s been so many things he’s wanted to tell Derek since he left. Things like _don’t worry;_ things like his goals of becoming a dean’s lister again this year getting pissed on by uptight professors, and he wants to laugh about his unruly neighbours and the trouble he got them into with the help of some tin foil and a near-sacred microwave, almost as much as he unabashedly wants to burn all his scruples and tell him _I hate you, but I cannot stop loving you._

He can’t take this. 

“Tell Adam I got a stomach bug,” he whispers to Greg who tells him, “You know he’ll never believe you, right?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” 

Stiles doesn’t hear Catherine’s aborted whispering about his leave, all he hears is the sound of his pounding heart and his shoes on the pavement walking him back to his door room. When he gets there, he makes a beeline for the kitchen drawer, where they keep a hammer, loose screws, and a 3-in-1 screwdriver Dad had insisted he bring with him that now makes all the sense in the world to have. He does a quick search in WikiHow ‘ _how to replace a door hinge’_ and stacks textbooks worth more than his car high at the front and back of the door to hold it in place. 

He gets to work. 

The problem with their door is that it’s stupidly loose and gets stuck. It needs to be barged open and closed every time, except for when Adam magically makes it shut neatly with the force behind his snark. Greg can’t disassemble himself out of a paper bag, so it’s been this way since freshman year. His RA doesn’t give a shit and never took his complaints seriously. Fixing a door hinge while being _emotionally_ unhinged is a piece of fucking work, apparently. But he does it. He directs all the noise in his head to manual labour, gets a splinter and nearly cries about it because when did life get so _painful_ and all sorts of flimsy, but he _does it._

A quarter to an hour later, he rests his forehead against the doorframe and shudders through a deep exhale. 

Derek haunts him in ways someone alive shouldn’t, and it shows in the way his hands tremble so hard when he fishes his phone out of his jeans. The text reads the same as it did months ago: short, bolded, and more daunting than it had any real right to be. 

**_Derek - July 23 6:47 PM_ **

_ < did you get there safe? _

Stiles looks at the last screw he needed to twist in to finish his work. He taps out, carefully, holding in an inhale —

**_You - 11:14 PM_ **

_ > yeah. I hope you're okay. _

Then, after a moments’ worth of hearing his own heart cracking in his ribs -

_ > we’re okay. _

He breathes out. The door closes shut smoothly for the first time in two years. 

. . .

Adam says, “I’m sorry if I - y’know - overstepped my poetic license this time,” the next day over brunch. 

Stiles tells him, forkful of pasta paused mid-way, and with all the earnestness in the world, “Thank you.” 


	2. Final Step

**Seventh step**

It’s a running theme in Stiles’ life that the fates get the drop on him again once he finally settles on a decision, and this time it comes in the form of their texting picking up gradually. It’s a crazy thing. 

Derek texts him back two days later, succinctly and with no promptness in true Derek fashion, _i’m glad._

And then, like a spell severing and a dam leaking before breaking all at once, it transforms from there. 

Stiles sends him a picture of a cat on campus that he swears up and down looks like him, and Derek tells him _you have a point._ During a GenEd class, Stiles’ phone vibrates with a message alert that makes his heart leap so bad he knocks his calculator from his desk. The text reads -

**_Derek - 2:25 PM_ **

_ > We rescued her. _

The text had no context whatsoever and Stiles wasn’t about to confuse himself over advanced calculus and _this_ so he doesn't see the photo attachment until after his lecture. It’s a picture of a grey kitten with yellow eyes on a familiar orange couch, her coat shabby, overgrown, and splashed with sun from a large bay window he knows by heart the trajectory of its light-letting. 

**_You - 3:02 PM_ **

_ < whats her name? _

**_Derek - 3:07 PM_ **

_ > I haven’t decided yet. _

**_You - 3:07 PM_ **

_ < name it after me?? _

**_Derek - 3:08 PM_ **

_ > The world can only handle one _

**_You - 3:08 PM_ **

_ < :P _

But it's not always casual, not always comfortable to be back in contact with Derek. Sometimes some conversations are so stilted he opts to leave it on read. But three months apparently doesn’t do much to a yearning heart, because Stiles falls asleep more often than not clutching his phone in his palm under the pillow and sleeping so lightly - a part of his consciousness always tuned into the sound of a text message - that he wakes up to check on an alert even when it’s 4AM and it’s just Duolingo telling him he’s missed his 1-week streak. But the thing is, Derek looks like he’s trying, even through text, and that’s enough. Good fucking _christ_ is it enough. 

Stiles must have been cursed with the incorrigible ability to be _easy_. Maybe he’s just in love and dumb. But he’d argue he hasn’t been dumb in a long time. What he’s been is introspective and patient, sullen but hopeful. And he hasn’t been hopeful in god-knows how fucking long. 

On a Tuesday, Stiles jokingly tells Derek to visit him. He replies, _maybe._

On a Thursday, Derek asks him, _Did I leave my jacket with you?_ (He did and Stiles took it to San Francisco with him -- but he’s not about to admit to that.)

On a Friday Stiles almost texts him, _I miss you._ (He deletes that one.)

On a Saturday, Stiles all but flails out of his bed when Derek’s contact flares into an incoming call. He slaps around his mattress to get ahold of his Samsung, failing to swipe at the screen three times with clumsy hands before he nearly wheezes out -

“Hello?” 

_“Hi.”_

Derek sounds the same. Derek sounds the fucking same and Stiles can’t remember not loving the way he sounds like.

“You sound - good. The same, I mean,” Stiles swallows, “Uh, sorry, why’d you call?” 

On the other end of the line Stiles hears a shifting of the sheets, and he gets a mental image of Derek in bed. He wonders if the sheets were grey or silver, if the brown blanket was out or if it was the one comforter that he doesn’t like paying dry cleaning for. Stiles liked that one the most. 

_“I just...hi.”_

“We already did that part,” Stiles’ lips quirk into a small smile. He hears Derek clearing his throat.

_“Are you coming back for Thanksgiving?”_

“Still not a big fan of small talk, huh? Don’t know what I expected but, uh, yeah. I think? Maybe not? I haven’t really decided yet.” 

_“Oh. Well, let me know.”_

Stiles furrows his eyebrows. “Did you honestly just call to ask if I’m going back for the holidays?”

Derek is silent for a while before he asks, sounding tentative, _“How are you?”_

“Good. I’m - I’m well, thanks. School’s going well. How’s things back in BH?”

_“Could be better. The Argents have been helping.”_

“I leave and you’ve teamed up with _hunters?”_

_“It was your idea.”_

“Yeah!” Stiles says too-loudly, “And I want proper credit for it! I’m full of good ideas and the one time you followed it I just _had_ to be in a different state. Not cool, Derek.” 

_“Would it make you feel better if I mentioned Chris said he knew he was just a stand-in for you?”_

“It would most definitely make me feel better, yes.”

The call didn’t end until the clock hit 2AM and Greg had thrown a pillow at him for laughing so loudly. Stiles slept with the butterflies stirring in his stomach that night. 

. . .

November 14 8:46 AM - 9:02 AM

**_Stiles_ **

**< ** _y do i do this to myself_

_ < help _

**_Derek_ **

_ > ? _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < i drank enough alcohol to make a werewolf tipsy last night _

_ < today, i suffer _

**_Derek_ **

_ > What do you want me to do? _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < werewolf mojo me from a jillion miles away _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Can’t _

_ > Drink your bodyweight in water _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < i already did that with alcohol _

_ < but ok ill try _

_ < death would be kinder _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Stop being dramatic _

_ > Don’t you have a 10AM class? _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < and _

_ < what about it _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Go to class. This is what you get for going to a party on a weeknight _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < i don't deserve this _

_ < :((((( _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Sources say you should eat greasy food _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < sources? _

_ < like, google? _

_ < did u do a google search for my hangover cause uve nvr had 1? _

_ < lol _

**_Derek_ **

_ > I do have internet connection _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < then y did u keep making me do ur research for u _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Just go to class. _

_. . ._

November 18 3:36 PM - 3:40 PM 

**_Stiles_ **

_ < if i don’t come home for thanksgiving would you visit? _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Sure _

_ > I’ll tell your father that’s exactly why you’re not coming home for Thanksgiving _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < >:(( _

_ < stop capitalizing properly like a weirdo _

_ < driving is haaaaard _

**_Derek_ **

_ > It’s less than 2 hours _

_ > Just come home _

_. . ._

November 19 12:14 PM - 12:20 PM

**_Stiles_ **

_ < I see your guilt tripping and I raise you: gas money issues _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Your dad will reimburse you _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < u talk as if ur best friends with my dad now _

**_Derek_ **

_ > I could be _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < what?? _

_ < how?? _

_ < dude?? _

_ < why do u say things like that and not reply _

**_Derek_ **

_ > It is not a big deal _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < no wonder ur friends with my dad u both refuse to text with contractions _

_ < seriously contractions save so much time _

_ < who has the patience for shakespearean texting _

**_Derek_ **

_ > I do _

_ > And the Sheriff _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < i’m texting him to confirm ur friendship _

_ < i cant believe ur friends wt my dad he tried to arrest u twice _

**_Derek_ **

_ > Whose fault was that? _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < that’s not the most pressing detail right now _

_ < i still don’t wanna pay for gas _

**_Derek_ **

_ > I’ll cover it? _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < no. _

_ < ok ill consider it _

_ < stop texting my dad behind my back _

**_Derek_ **

_ > No. _

_. . ._

Adam was the first to notice something different. He asks Stiles, “How are you in love again?” during a free period they spend on the quadrangle, soaking up the sun on a ratty picnic blanket that Stiles considered fashion but Adam hadn’t hesitated to spread out on the grass. 

Stiles fingers the outline of his phone inside his pockets, and answers, “I don’t think I ever stopped.” 

. . .

November 20 11:19 PM - 3:26 AM

“Is everything okay there?”

_“Well it’s Beacon Hills. It could always be better.”_

“Do you ever wish you could leave?”

_“I already did that. With Laura, years ago.”_

“And?” 

_“I ended up right back here, didn’t I?”_

_…_

“I don’t think I can remember what my mom sounds like. Like, I know it vaguely, but it’s almost like guessing what a character from a childhood TV show sounds like.”

_“I get that. I’ve forgotten a lot of people that way. I’m trying not to forget Laura.”_

“I’m sorry you’ve lost so much.”

_“Time helps. I’ve gained more since then, too.”_

…

“It was! I swear! Everyone had to exit the building, the firemen pulled up at like - three? Four AM? My RA was mad as _fuck,_ and the potheads from 23C thought it was their fault - it was hilarious you had to be there. Anyways, I orchestrated the whole thing and didn’t get caught.” 

_“You’re a menace.”_

“Nuh-uh, if anything I’m like a modern Robin Hood, dude. I _had_ to do it for the sake of everyone on my floor! Our neighbours were loud as shit and they deserved to be punished for it.” 

_“Whatever you say. Do you have a new microwave now?”_

“Oh, no. People are starving. But at least we’re getting quality sleep.” 

…

_“I’m sorry.”_

“I am, too.” 

“ _I wasn’t thinking straight.”_

“I know.”

_“I don’t know how to make it up to you.”_

“You don’t have to. Forgiveness is given. Here’s mine.” 

…

_“Yeah, Chris hasn’t. He thinks Peter is still out to destroy everyone.”_

“I mean, don’t we all think that?”

_“Yeah but we don’t say it to his face.”_

“ _I_ say it to his face.” 

_“I think that’s why you’re his favourite.”_

“How’s the rest of the pack taking to partnering up with the local Hunter force?”

_“Erica’s sweet-talking Chris and Scott is just glad he gets to have Allison constantly in the fold. It’s working out well.”_

“How are any of you surviving without my research skills?”

_“We manage.”_

…

“You _do_ know they’re the same thing right?”

_“They are not.”_

“They are. Constellations have alternative names.”

_“But that’s confusing. They should just have one.”_

“Look, buddy, I don’t make the rules. Why are we talking about constellations anyways? I thought you always preferred ‘the moon’ like the werewolf cliche you are.”

_“I still haven’t given Cat a name.”_

“Your rescue? You just - refer to her as...Cat?”

_“Yeah.”_

“That is so you. Jesus. Okay, well, what name did you have in mind?”

_“I was thinking of ‘Orion.’”_

…

_“No. It wasn’t just sex.”_ Stiles hears him inhale deeply. _“I still think you’re next to me sometimes, whenever I wake up.”_

“...I do, too. To both.” He runs a hand across his face, rubbing the tired out of his eyes. “You fucking confuse me, Derek Hale. And yet I’ve never been so sure about anyone in my life.”

Derek scoffs softly. _“Lydia?”_

“If you’re comparing a teenage crush to an adult decision, that’s your problem.” 

_“I...Okay. You got me there.”_ Derek sighs. _“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I keep saying I’m sorry.”_

“I’m sorry I’m not changing my mind.” He pillows his hand under his head, looking up at the ceiling of his dorm room. “I forgive you.”

_“You shouldn’t.”_

“I don’t think I’m capable of doing that.” Irritation bubbles up in him briefly. “And don’t do that shit again. Don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. That’s the last time you do that.” 

_“Okay,”_ Derek says softly, _“I’m…”_

“Tell me you’re sorry again and I’ll hang up on you so fast you’ll get whiplash. Whatever that means. I never found out, but you _will_ feel it.”

Derek chuckles, amused and reserved. His exhale gets picked up by the receiver. _“I was going to say I missed you.”_

“Oh.” 

_“Oh.”_

“I can hear you smirking.” 

_“I’m not.”_

“ ‘Don’t believe it. Swear on something.”

_“That’s unnecessary."_

“Just do it, Derek! I need to make sure you’re not just making fun of me.” 

_“Why would I want - ? Fine. You’re an idiot. What do you even want me to swear on.”_ There’s no inflection to the question, because that’s how Derek talks. 

“I don’t know. Whatever it is you love with that cold, dead prune you call a heart.” 

_“Is that supposed to be an insult?”_

“No, that’s just how I flirt with everybody.”

_“So you’re flirting with me now?”_

“ _No_ \- Derek! Just answer the question.”

_“And the question is -?”_

“ _My_ question is who are you and what have you done to the Sourwolf.”

_“That’s dramatic. All I said was I missed you.”_

“Have you met me? I only speak in drama. Now swear on something you love so I know you’re not shitting me. I’ve got _feelings_ , Hale, and they are _not_ to be toyed with - not after all the counselling I went through.” 

_“Okay, okay. Calm down. I swear I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t joke about that.”_

“Swear on something.”

_“I swear on you. Okay?”_

Stiles quiets down immediately. All he hears is the buzzing of the air conditioning in one ear, Derek’s breathing in the other. 

_“Stiles?”_

He blinks and wets his lips before asking, “You’re...you better not be shitting me.”

_“No. I wouldn’t.”_

For the second time that night, all he can say is, “Oh.” 

_“You okay?”_

“Yeah,” he breathes out, feeling something warm spread across his chest, filling in the gaps of his breast bone. “I miss you too, big guy.” 

…

_“I think it’s time I got a house.”_

“I think it’s time you bought yourself a therapist. But what kind of house?”

Derek laughs. It’s a good kind of laugh. _“I’ve been looking into rebuilding my family’s house. Blue shutters. Wrap-around porch.”_ There’s a yawn. _“Big kitchen.”_

“I think that sounds nice.” Stiles imagines a large house where the pack is welcome, a headquarters and a home all at once. “You’d need a bigger bed. Like a double California King. Don’t kid yourself into thinking I’m the only one who’d want to sleep close to their Alpha.” 

_“They can shack up with Scott for all I care. I get you and that’s that.”_

Stiles has to fight a stupid grin. He fails. “You are naive.” 

_“I’m building you a house. I’ll be whatever the hell I want.”_

“Is this how you flirt with everyone, Derek? Lure them with carpentry and the prospect of a kitchen?” 

_“No. Just the ones I can’t stand.”_

“Shut up. You absolutely do not hate me.”

 _“Yeah,”_ Derek says, and he sounds like he’s smiling. Stiles isn’t sure. He’d like to think so. _“I really don’t.”_

…

The day after, he’s up too early, and Greg is glaring at him over a bowl of Trix for breakfast in the common room. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you are not Taylor Swift. You do _not_ get to keep me up and make me listen to your goddamn love story at two in the morning. And what the fuck is up with your hometown?”

Stiles opens his mouth to respond -

“No, you know what? I don’t want to know,” Greg says quickly, shovelling down more of his soggy cereal. 

Stiles would feel more guilty about the dark rings under his roommate’s eyes if he weren’t feeling so fucking sprightly. He chews on his muffin instead. 

“Next year, we’re getting singles,” Greg says decidedly. “Next year, you better be over your honeymoon phase. Catherine’s a party animal, Adam thinks 3AM is prime writing time, and you’re _in love._ Meanwhile _I’m_ the only one trying to get some _goddamn_ sleep around here.” 

. . .

November 22 11:11 PM - 11:12 PM

**_Stiles_ **

_ < i’m coming home :) _

_ < tell dad and everyone else _

**_Derek_ **

_ > We’ll be waiting _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < :)))) _

_ < advanced happy thxgiving _

**_Derek_ **

_ > The only thing I’m thankful for is you _

**_Stiles_ **

_ < !!!!!!! <3 <3 <3 _

_. . ._

He rolls into Beacon Hills right as dusk is starting to fall. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it looked exactly the same as he left it. The driveway is hidden under a pile of un-raked leaves and it crunches satisfyingly under the weight of his tyres. Standing by the doorway is the Sheriff, holding a steaming mug of something in his hand, leaning against the entryway’s alcove. 

Stiles unbuckles his belt so fast he almost gets entangled in it. He heaves his laptop bag over one shoulder and races towards his house, where he gets welcomed with a patent-pending Stilinski hug and a, “Welcome home, kiddo.”

Thanksgiving preparation goes like this: Scott and Melissa come over to take over the kitchen, Stiles burns himself while peeling potatoes, Dad makes off-season cider, and Erica bullies him into inviting her to dinner. He texts everyone who was in town - Boyd who came home from UCLA, Isaac who wants to bring in a kid he took under his wing called Liam, Derek who promptly says no, and even Lydia and Jackson who he didn’t expect would stay in town for the holidays. 

Only Isaac and Erica made it, wearing twin expressions of mischief and excitement. Stiles gets tackled into wearing an ugly sweater Isaac knitted for him for his birthday but took half a year to finish, and Erica only got her slice of fun later when they’re all appropriately as stuffed as the turkey post-dinner. 

“So,” she says suggestively, “You and Derek?” 

Stiles doesn’t catch the grin that spreads across his face in time. “Me and Derek.” 

“What about Derek?” Scott picks up from the other end of the room, where he’s sulking over not being invited to the Argents’ dinner. 

“Nothing,” Erica says cheerily. She weasels herself under his arm and drapes her legs across his.

“What’re you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m making you smell like me so he gets jealous.” 

“Who’s getting jealous?” Isaac pipes up from the bathroom where he’s got the faucet running. 

“No one!” Stiles yells, causing the Sheriff to jump in his armchair and look back and forth at him and Isaac’s general direction suspiciously. 

“I’m too full to ask,” Dad says with a hand on his distended stomach. 

Erica snickers into her mug of cider. 

  
  


In the safety of his room at half past midnight, he shoots Derek a text: _how’d you spend today?_

**_Derek - 12:36 AM_ **

_ > Ordered in. How was your Thanksgiving? _

**_Stiles - 12:36 AM_ **

_ < was good! _

_ < better if u were here _

_ < but i get it _

**_Derek - 12:37 AM_ **

_ > I’ll make it up to you tomorrow? _

**_Stiles - 12:37 AM_ **

_ < don’t wanna come by thru the window for old times’ sake? _

**_Derek - 12:38 AM_ **

_ > Not on a national holiday, I don’t think so _

**_Stiles - 12:39 AM_ **

_ < boo, ur lame _

_ < thought you missed me _

**_Derek - 12:39 AM_ **

_ > I do. _

_ > I just want to do it right this time _

**_Stiles - 12:39 AM_ **

_ < i have absolutely no virtue to speak of so _

_ < don’t feel like u need to protect me from anything lol _

**_Derek - 12:40 AM_ **

_ > Still. _

**_Stiles - 12:40 AM_ **

_ < wanna try something? _

_ < pick up the phone _

He presses the call button. 

_“Yes?”_

“So what do you know about phone sex?” 

Derek's answering laugh chimes in clearly over the speakers. _“Nothing. Other than the feeling I’m getting that you’re about to convince me of it.”_

“Is that a yes?”

_“You’re an impatient idiot.”_

Stiles lays back on his mattress, rubbing his stomach with the hand not holding the phone to his ear. “That’s not a no either. Now the thought’s in your head and it’ll be hard to not think of it. Face it, Der, you’re just gonna get hard even if you turn me down or not. At least, if you get on board, you can listen to me come.” 

Derek is silent on the other end for a moment. Stiles draws patterns across his hip bones, feeling his dick stir at the light stimulation. He palms the front of his underwear, unhurried and teasing. His cock starts to make an outline in his briefs, very slowly fattening up. 

_“Are you touching yourself right now?”_

“Yeah,” he lets his voice drop to its laziest register, “Are you gonna do something about it or do I have to do all the work around here?”

Derek chuckles. _“Shouldn’t have expected any less from a twenty-year-old.”_

“I’ll have you know, I only had a one-night stand _once._ It freaked me out and I’ve been celibate and well-acquainted with my right hand since.” He pushes his underwear down to let his dick out, already half-hard. He strokes it lightly as he talks. “You’ve pretty much ruined me for everyone, Derek Hale.” 

_“That’s hard to believe.”_

He swipes a hand over the head of his cock and inhales sharply. “Better believe it. All I think about is having sex with you when I wanna get off. It’s fool-proof, too.” 

_“Are you really going to get off through the phone?”_

“Like it isn’t -” he hiccups on a suppressed moan “- isn’t obvious already.”

_“Christ, Stiles. You’re already halfway there aren’t you.”_

“Hey, give me a little more credit than that. You know how I am in bed already. I’ve got an Olympic medal in dick-riding.” 

_“So dirty, yet so dumb. You’re good at entertaining yourself, I’ll give you that.”_

“You’re helping. I bet you I can get off just by listening to the sound of your voice.” 

_“Let me hear it then.”_

A smile spreads across his face slowly, and he takes it as a challenge. His dick is almost fully hard now. He rifles through the bedside table to bring out his secret lube packet hidden inside a plushie he won at a state fair. He rips it out with his teeth, gets strawberry-flavoured lube on his lips, and runs the slick along his length. He makes sure to sigh directly into the phone’s receiver, makes sure to let every hitch of his breath and low moans carry over to Derek’s end. 

Stiles hears very minimal noise from the man. In all honesty, he wouldn’t mind having a one-sided masturbation over the phone with only Derek’s encouragement getting him there, but finally, he hears the first sound Derek makes. It’s nothing too telling, just a humming he’s luckily all-too familiar with, and he imagines what Derek is doing, if he’s got the sheets bunched around down his hips or if he’s on the couch, sweatpants rumpled just past his hips. 

Stiles wonders if you can miss a person as much as you can miss their dick. “What are you doing?” He asks. 

_“What I’m supposed to be, apparently.”_

“What’re you thinking of?”

 _“You,”_ Derek says so low it makes Stiles shiver, _“always you.”_

“Yeah?”

_“ I never could get enough of you.”_

“Me either.” He rolls his balls with his fingers and squeezes the base of his dick before pumping himself up and down. “I’ve wanted you to fuck me since I got back home. _God_ I’d give anything to be fucked right now. On my back. On my knees. Doesn’t matter.”

 _“I like you on your knees,”_ Derek punctuates with a subtle groan. _“But I love you on your back.”_

Stiles feels seized with the words that he tries not to think too much of. Derek hadn’t said he loved him in the right context. He shouldn’t focus on anything but getting off and sounding sexy enough to make Derek come. 

“I like feeling full of you. Just - just full. Like you’re swallowing me whole but even that’s not enough.” His precum mixes in with the lube in spurts. He sets up a steady pace for himself, switching between his balls and his shaft until he feels his toes start curling. 

_“And you take it so well. I’ve always loved fucking you.”_ There’s a new, guttural character to Derek’s enunciation, and Stiles takes even more pleasure in hearing it. He wishes he could have more than this, more than Derek whispering in his ear and telling him he _loves_ Stiles’ body. He loves the word ‘love’ when it rolls so easily off of Derek’s tongue. He wants to hear it again. He wants to hear it for the rest of _for_ and _ever._

“It’s hot when you lose control. When you’re buried inside me. And I can - can see how red your eyes are, even with my eyes closed. The way you look, babe - _Ah, fuck.”_ His hips jerk up when pleasure shoots through him. “Reminds me you’re the alpha. 'Don’t wanna be anyone else’s.”

Derek’s growl is near subsonic and something in Stiles’ brain _malfunctions._

_“I hated it. Every time you tried to get my smell off of you.”_

“I hated it more.”

From there it’s like a race to chase each other to the ends of their orgasms. Stiles is turned on, so _unbelievably_ turned on by talking dirty and _feeling_ dirty and he wants to come after Derek just so he can hear him properly when he does. 

But Stiles was already ten tugs shy away from falling apart, so he lets himself erupt into a drawn-out moan that he hopes Derek hears and never forgets until the next time they get to be together and do this right _._ He vaguely registers Derek coming, then coming down, and eventually they both putter out into heavy breathing and the distant sounds of them wiping themselves off. Stiles feels so relaxed, stomach heavy and dick spent, and he sighs as he settles into his mattress. 

“Imagine...if we were actually together,” he drawls. 

_“You wouldn’t stand a chance.”_

He laughs dazedly. “You wouldn’t either. Don’t lie.”

_“I never did.”_

“I walked in your loft and you were done for.” 

_“I kissed you once and it threw you in for a loop.”_

Stiles smiles privately at the memory. Derek had absolutely _no idea_. “You suck.”

_“You’d know.”_

“Well you... _you_ are the fucking north star.”

_“Was that an insult?”_

“Nope.”

_“I don’t know what that means, Stiles.”_

“You’ve got the internet now. Google it." Stiles yawns, the exhaustion settling in his bones. "Goodnight, Sourwolf.”

_“Good night."_

"I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

_"Count on it."_

The call clicks to an end. 

Before he could well and truly drift off to sleep, he gets a message alert that his body has been trained to jolt into consciousness for. It’s one line of text that reads:

**_Derek - 1:56 AM_ **

_ > And you are the moon. _

. . .

When he wakes up, the first thing he thinks is _I'm in love._

. . . 

Mid-day and the only thing in his head 

is getting to see Derek again. 

. . . 

His heart feels full, flighty, and real. He folds his hands over his chest, in that way he's always done, except this time it is to stop the light from seeping out.

. . . 

But then -- silence.

. . .

**_You - 3:26 PM_ **

_ < where r you? _

_. . ._

**_You - 4:56 PM_ **

_ < seriously. _

_ < thought we had plans today? _

_. . ._

**_You - 5:01 PM_ **

_ < :// _

_ < if ur freaked out i get it _

_ < tell me if its ok to come to the loft? hash it out? no talking required. _

_ < we'll send each other smoke signals _

_. . ._

**_You - 5:27 PM_ **

_ < im worried now. as soon as you see this call me _

_. . ._

**_You - 5:29 PM_ **

_[Mass Text]_

_ < any1 seen derek? _

**_Erica - 5:30 PM_ **

_ > No why? _

_ > Batman _

_ > u fell asleep again didnt u _

_ > fucker _

_. . ._

**_[Missed Call from Argent - 6:17 PM]_ **

**_[Missed Call from Argent - 6:20 PM]_ **

**_[Missed Call from Scott - 6:26 PM]_ **

. . .

**_[Outgoing Call to Argent Failed]_ **

**_[Outgoing Call to Scott Failed]_ **

**_[Outgoing Call to Argent Failed]_ **

. . . 

**_Argent - 8:26 PM_ **

_ < Come to the loft. _

. . .

His panic comes to him in four stages 

First, the message. The bleary awakening of a bad evening nap. The missed calls he didn't take and the calls he couldn't make. 

Second, the drive to Hawthorne. He'd been on autopilot and had forgotten to put on socks before flying out the door and into the Jeep. 

Third, the walk up to the loft. The tremor in his entire body, bones straining under the weight of muscles pulling his 10,000-tonne body up the flight of stairs until he reached the door. 

Fourth, the tearing of his chest when he sees Derek's blood on the floor before finding Derek himself. 

. . . 

When Stiles was 8, his mother had told him, "We all get one good thing in this life, baby." She had turned to Dad and said to the both of them, "But sometimes you get lucky and you get to have two." 

He's never had his _one_ good thing, much less two. 

He just didn't expect to have nothing at all and somehow hit lower than rock bottom. 

. . . 

Chris comes to his side, face gaunt and shadowed. 

"He's healing, I think." 

There's a knife sticking out of Derek's chest. The wound attached to it is glowing faintly blue-violet, the colour of wolfsbane. 

"What happened," he says in a whisper, lowering himself to the floor on the side of Derek's bed. Some part of him is detached from this moment right now, but another has latched onto the gritty feeling of being a few heartbeats shy away from losing everything. 

“Hunters from Santa Rosa. That’s a knife.”

Well that was fucking obvious. 

Chris continues, “It’s dipped in three strains of wolfsbane. It’s the only thing that can bring an Alpha werewolf down in one plunge.” He drags a hand across his face. “I’m sorry.”

Stiles doesn’t know what he’s apologising for. 

“When - ?” 

“I was in Santa Rosa and they struck outta - outta nowhere. Deaton’s on his way. I’ve done everything I could to kickstart healing from his other wounds but that -” he gestures towards Derek “- that knife, I can’t take it out without killing him.”

Chris positions himself to sag against the side of the bed frame next to Stiles, and some irrational part of him thinks this is weird. This is Chris Argent, and his father has tried to kill Stiles and his friends, and his sister burned down the entire Hale family. But now he’s on the floor with Stiles, sporting a grim look on his face that nearly matches the terror on the younger man’s features. 

“He was my first call, and he- he drove right away. He saved my fucking life and I -” Chris’ voice breaks the same way Stiles feels his heart go. “He’ll be fine, kid. He _has_ to be.” 

Stiles can’t bring himself to touch Derek like he wants to, like he believes he could somehow suck the poison out of Derek’s body and throw it back to Santa Rosa. He hasn’t felt this powerless since he sat at the foot of his mother’s deathbed. There's a dull ache in his chest that he won’t acknowledge, because that meant giving up. That meant not trusting Deaton’s capabilities and not believing in Derek’s headstrong quality of somehow always managing to _stay alive_ and it meant, if he let the ache cave inside him and collapse into panic, that he’d be preparing himself to say goodbye like he did a decade ago with Claudia. 

And he refuses to do that. 

What he does is count his breath, each one more laden than the last. He suspects it’s what Chris is doing next to him, and he leeches a strange sort of comfort from this. Here’s what he knows: the war is never where it’s supposed to be. It’s not in the middle of the Preserve where the Bukavac nearly killed him, not in Mexico where they found Kate years back, and not even in Beacon Hills where the Nemeton has wreaked havoc on all their lives and left a house to burn and families to have perished. Anyone who’s ever been on the frontlines of a battle would know this. Because _that_ ? That was nothing. A battle is only built on the ground opposing forces tread on it. But the war, the _real_ war, is this. 

It’s the counting of your breath because you’re struggling to catch it. It’s the unceasing fear of _losing_ something, someone, and it’s the war you wage on the universe to dare it into taking them away. It’s the anger that doesn’t just dissipate, towards Hunters who don't follow codes, towards death who kicks down doors before anyone is ready to let them in. It’s this, seeing Derek near-comatose, and wishing on every fucking star and every deity that this won’t be the one time Derek doesn’t pull through. 

It is the fight you can’t get out of, the pain you can’t compartmentalise away. It’s the aftermath. And somehow, that’s worse than any battle Stiles has won without a reward. 

This one has no clear end. 

. . .

Deaton cleans the skin around the wound, attaches some sort of IV to Derek filled with questionable liquid, and leaves three vials in Stiles’ care. Layered poisons require complex antidotes, but not even Deaton could certify it would work. Stiles clutches onto them like a lifeline.

When Chris leaves with Deaton, he’s all alone. Except for the cat. It’s the only time Stiles has seen her outside of Derek’s text messages. She’s just a ball of fuzz, curled lazily on the couch, not knowing the peril her owner was in, while Stiles brings out the mop and cleans up all the blood on the floor. 

When there wasn’t anything left to clean, he crashes on the couch next to her. She blinks at him curiously, yellow eyes surveying his presence. He squints at the tag on her collar.

She’s wearing the keychain he left with Derek around her neck. 

. . .

The pack finds out at some point, but he’s not exactly sure when. Maybe the third day or the fourth - time ticks by so differently when you’re so scared all the time. They all rush to see Derek for themselves, but there’s nothing they can do but hope against all other hopes that the antidotes work. Chris visits more than anyone else, even Deaton himself, who comes by daily to check on his patient. Stiles pretends not to notice how many times Deaton shakes his head while he does this.

“I owe him my life,” Chris tells him one time, and then confesses, “The last thing he told me was to not let you see him like this.”

“And yet here we are.” 

“Have you gone home at all since?” 

What would be the _point?_

“Of course not,” he answers, “my dad knows, if that’s what you're worried about.”

“No, I’m glad. That it’s you. That he has you,” Chris clears his throat. “Did he tell you he was the one who approached me when you left?” 

Stiles is in the small kitchen, where there’s only really a butane burner, a fridge, and half of a counter. He’s making soup for himself and opening a can of cat food for Orion, who has accepted him into her space like he belonged there. 

“I think so, yeah. That was a good call.”

“Yeah,” Chris agrees awkwardly. Stiles doesn’t know what to do with him, but he recognises the guilt in the set of Chris’ eyebrows. It’s the same guilt he’s seen on Derek’s for surviving at the cost of someone else getting hurt. Stiles knows how to handle this guilt, if anything.

“I’m glad he had - _has_ you, too,” he tells Chris while stirring the saucepan methodically, “Ironically enough, if there was anyone he could relate to, it would be you.” 

“Ironically enough,” the older man parrots as he nods slowly. “Listen, I’ll come by tomorrow. Are you good here? Do you - d’you need anything? More…” he squints at the counter, “More soup?” 

“Cat food, actually. The Wellness kind, if possible.”

“Got it.” Chris moves to exit, grabbing his jacket from the couch and walking towards the loft’s rolling door, then hesitates before turning back to look at him. “He -”

Chris doesn’t speak for a few seconds and Stiles is stuck staring at him, pausing his stirring mid-way. Finally, the man says, “He really loves you. That’s - he would’ve wanted you to know that before -” he waves his hand ambiguously “- all this. Yeah, and uh, that’s all. Just...thought you should know.” 

Stiles sucks in a breath and blinks in quick successions at him, fighting back the stinging behind his eyes that catches him off-guard. “I know, thanks. It’s...I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You will.” The door rolls shut.

And then he’s alone again.

. . .

The dosage routine is this: two drops of green on his wound, five drops of red on his tongue, and one of purple. Whatever’s in them, Stiles hopes it’s working its magic. 

Derek’s been bleeding black through his wound for five days. 

. . .

On the sixth day, Stiles prepares himself for the possibility of him not making it at all. 

. . .

More often than not, he’s alone. The pack and even the Sheriff come in and out to check on him and Derek, but he prefers to be without company anyways. Having people around makes him even more antsy, more prone to have his hackles raised in fear of someone moving _wrong_ and somehow making Derek’s situation worse. It’s as irrational as it is a real fear of his. 

But he rarely feels lonely. He sits on the floor on the side of the bed frame so often, he won’t be surprised if his ass has started to wear a divot there. Orion joins him, and he talks. He tells them both about the most inane stories, and sometimes Orion purrs in response or Derek’s fingers twitch incrementally.

Today he tells Derek about what he’d want for the house, how the kitchen should have two ovens and two dishwashers because fuck if he’d have to wash dishes for the entire pack. There should be more than 7 and less than 12 bedrooms, allotted space at the ready for visitors or a new addition to their growing group of misfits. He’d like a flower garden in honour of his mother. He thinks they should have two living rooms, because he’s seen on MTV how celebrities have more than one living room and always thought that would be cool, to be able to say _yeah, I have two living rooms for no reason at all_. 

He tells him, “I love you. Most of all, I want you to wake up.”

But today, Derek’s hand doesn’t seem to show any sign of movement. 

. . .

When Chris asks him if he needs any help again, Stiles asks for a copy of all the compendiums on magical medicine the Argents could possibly have. Chris delivers four tomes, and Stiles and he go through them steadily for days. They loop Deaton in on their discoveries, and they decide to risk making a potion to inject in Derek’s veins. 

The first time they tried it, the colour immediately went back to Derek’s usual pallor. It faded, however, after a few hours. Deaton said he’d run more tests. 

They find a rare incident of using mountain ash to counter the effects of poison written in one of the books, but its level of risk is high and it required a seasoned magic practitioner that even Deaton couldn’t fill the part of. So they keep trying their first option, and Stiles keeps holding his breath. 

. . .

The first time Stiles encountered a math problem he couldn’t talk his way out of, Claudia taught him about the value of not giving up. She told him, “The world is far too round for you to find a dead end, honey. There is always a way to find two things: home, and an answer.” 

Stiles had thrown a whole tantrum over fractions, but he got there eventually.

The point is, he’s not about to give up on Derek; not then, when he was about to cut off the man’s arm just to keep him alive, or every time Stiles has had to punch him into consciousness, and not now, when Stiles needs him the most. Not ever. 

. . .

He cries, of course he does. He cries in between sweeping the floor of the loft and calling Deaton for updates, in between feeding Orion and himself, but he doesn’t dare cry in Derek’s unconscious presence. Here, he tells Derek, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and he pretends Derek says back, “Count on it,” the way he did the last night Stiles ever got to hear from him. It aches to think that the time he finally gets to be around Derek, this is the situation they’re in. 

Whenever he can, he does homework. He tells his friends and e-mails his professors that there was a family emergency that he needed to attend to. They offer him an online learning platform until “he’s back on his feet again,” whenever that’s going to be. 

He doesn’t know how long he can keep it together like this. 

. . .

Spending years vanquishing creatures that go _bump_ in the night has turned him into an extremely light sleeper. You never know who’s crashing through your window. Usually, it was Derek, but that can’t be. 

Derek’s in a coma. 

Stiles startles immediately from the couch, reaching for the bat he keeps on the armchair next to it. He keeps the lights off at night but the lamp on in Derek’s bedroom. There’s a figure hovering over Derek’s bed, and Stiles doesn’t waste time in springing to action. 

He’s got his bat in hand and poised to swing as he runs towards the room. The figure ducks and immediately uses Stiles’ momentum to kick him on the side of his head. Pain bursts across his face so startlingly that he careens to the side, stumbling on his own ankles and dropping to the floor. The figure - _a woman_ , he realises - rummages in her pocket to cast her hand out, splaying mountain ash all over the bed. Stiles is too busy scrambling to get up on his feet to notice the ash assembling themselves around Derek’s body, but he spots it as soon as he’s standing on wobbly feet. Fear seizes him as the woman starts chanting what sounds to be something distinctly Latin and the circle starts _glowing_ in response. Stiles doesn't know what else to do other than use his full body weight to crash into her, breaking her focus and causing them to land on a heap on the floor. 

He grapples to pin her arms to the floor, but she wraps her legs around his hips and weasels one arm out of his grip to clamp it around the back of his neck. This effectively immobilizes him, but he’s got one hand pressing down on her wrist which frees his right side, so he nearly strains his neck by ducking his head out of her hold and bringing her other hand down to the floor once he’s free. 

What he has over her in brute strength she has on him with tricks up her sleeve. She’s wearing a mask over her face but her ominous near-black eyes peek through it. She whispers something and Stiles’ eyes that were trained on hers _whites out_. Panic surges in his veins as one of his senses gets stolen from him, but it makes his grip on her forearms turn so tight he’s sure he could break it if he really wanted to. 

She cries out in pain and struggles against him. Her voice turns venomous as she thrashes under him, her legs kicking his spine, angrily reciting that chilling spell of hers again. Stiles does the only thing he could think of doing - he brings his head back to bash it against her skull. His already-smarting face feels like it’s just cracked against a rock, but it stops her from talking. Instead, she yowls in pain and pushes Stiles away from her with a surprising amount of force. Disoriented, he gets thrown back to the floor and immediately, he looks for something, anything, to hold as a weapon as he expects her to throttle him. 

By a stroke of luck, he feels the grooves of his bat’s handle. He pricks himself on one of the barbs but barely feels it with all the adrenaline pumping through him. He feels for the edge of the bed frame to avoid its general vicinity and starts swinging wildly, waiting for his bat to collide with the intruder. Terror grips him as he keeps hitting air and he honest-to-god starts _praying_ that Derek’s okay, that the mountain ash does nothing to him, and that with some miracle, the assassin leaves the loft before this ends in death. 

His bat snags on the foot of the bed frame and his heart lurches. He turns his body away to avoid it. He keeps swinging, catching the bat on the walls and furniture as he blindly aims for a body. He hears a scuffling to his left and he lunges forward with a forceful swing of his weapon. He feels it collide with something that sounds with a solid _thud_ followed by a piercing _scream_ that tells him _fuck, I got her._

Almost immediately, something hits him in the chest, sending him flying across the room where his back only half-slams onto the doorway, dislocating his shoulder with a sickening crack as the rest of his body gets thrown out. Stiles yells out in agony because not even his adrenaline could drown out all the trauma inflicted on his body. The world bursts into _painpainpainpain_ and he feels anger and the burn of his muscles consume his entire being, so much of it that it feels like it’s crackling like lightning inside of him. 

The woman starts chanting again and Stiles cannot see, cannot even _move,_ but suddenly he feels _everything_ with a sharp focus. He’s felt this once before, when he concentrated so hard he severed a mountain ash circle clean. He felt the forest, the ground humming like a greeting under him. Now he feels the magic in the room, originating from the woman, Derek, and the mountain ash that’s trapping him outside of his coma. 

_“GET OUT!”_ Stiles bellows angrily. 

The chanting only grows louder and Stiles could _feel_ its potency like it was an extension of him. His entire focus shifts into grabbing ahold of it, pushing it away from Derek, trying to imagine the ash bending to his will and cutting away from its own magical properties. There’s a tugging in his gut that transforms into a proper ache once the magic seems to notice his intrusion. Stiles whittles everything away into one intention: save Derek Hale even if it meant laying waste to everything else. 

And suddenly, he hears a loud _booming_ sound that rings in his ears thunderous enough that he feels his hearing go. He’s incapacitated, blind, and now deaf. His adrenaline gets shot to hell when his body finally chooses fading out of consciousness to preserve itself. 

Stiles only had pain to feel before everything shuts out. 

. . .

_“...stable...three hours…”_

_“How...manage...the time...”_

_“Sheriff...everything...apologies…”_

_. . ._

The ceiling lights are blinding. It’s the only way he realises he can see, even through his eyelids.

_“He’s okay...week...over…”_

_“...surely...check....Friday?”_

_“Okay..when...give...Melissa?”_

_. . ._

_“Stiles?”_

He can hear, at least.

. . .

Sometimes he’ll wake up with the sensation of his right palm sweating. He doesn’t know who’s holding onto them. 

. . .

He fades into consciousness at night, he thinks, because the lights are off and for a second it makes him fear he still doesn’t have his eyesight back. But slowly, the outline of the foot of his hospital bed comes into focus. 

He feels like time is made of syrup. Everything feels slow, his head thick with fog. There’s a figure slumped on the bench near the TV, with the light from his heart monitor catching the glint of a badge. His father, most likely. 

He tries to move his extremities incrementally and feels something clutching onto his hand. He looks down, and he swears he sees Derek’s head resting on the side-end of the bed.

. . .

Morning light rouses Stiles into proper consciousness. It’s immediately the worst decision, like, ever. 

The first thing he does is scramble for the nurse’s call button, clicking it three times for good measure. A man in scrubs enters the room after seven long seconds and greets, “Sheriff’s kid is awake!” 

“Uhm yes,” Stiles croaks out, the words feeling awkward to make with a throat this dry. “Can I...have painkillers?”

The nurse fully walks inside the room and heads straight to his IV, tinkering with something. “You’re on your maximum dosage of morphine, kid. How’s the pain? Rate it from one-to-ten.” 

“Twenty.”

His nurse laughs good-naturedly. “Nice try. At most, I can give you water and some pudding. How’s that?” 

Stiles attempts to shrug, but his shoulders felt like it had been taken out and replaced with a jagged Lego piece. He hisses, “ _Shit._ How...bad was it when I went in here?” 

“Pretty bad, dude,” his nurse - Elliot, it says on his tag - answers. “You’ve been out for three days. But you’re up and asking for more drugs now so I assume you’re on your way to recovery. How’s your shoulder?”

“Do I still even have both?”

Elliot snorts through a rather unattractive laugh. “You’re already funny. Good sign, good sign. Oh hey, want me to tell your dad and your boyfriend you’re up?”

“My what?” Stiles frowns. 

“Uh-oh. Do you know what year it is, Stiles?” 

“I don’t have amnesia,” Stiles rolls his eyes and just hurts himself in the process. “Just wondering if...if my ‘boyfriend’ looked like a serial killer.”

“With the eyebrows?” Elliot mimics an exaggerated frown. “Yeah, that’s him, right? ‘Cause this is gonna be really awkward since we’ve listed him as your second emergency contact.”

 _Yeah,_ Stiles thinks, _I just had to be sure he isn’t in a magically-induced coma anymore._

“No that’s cool,” he says instead, “Could you...help me contact him first before my dad knows about it?”

“Weird, but okay. We’ll be running some tests on you later, though, so he can’t stay for long. He usually sneaks in at night anyways, so I don’t know why I bother telling a patient that.” Elliot punctuates this by scribbling on his clipboard, then says, “Okay! See you later, champ. We’ll give your boyfriend a heads-up.” 

When Elliot leaves, Stiles checks his limbs. He’s able to move most of his extremities, it seems, and the most important thing is he’s got his vision back. His memories of the fight trickles in slowly, and he wonders how the _fuck_ he got here and how did Derek heal from the most lethal poison known to werewolves. He wonders what happened to the assassin who used magic on the both of them. He also wonders briefly just how grounded he’s going to be once his father gets to see him awake. 

All the questions fly out of the window once his hospital room door opens, and he sees Derek’s rushing in.

Holy shit, Derek’s rushing in and _he’s alive._

“You are, too,” the older man says. 

“What?” he reacts dumbly, though it comes out more as ‘wuh’ more than a coherent question. 

Derek steps closer to his hospital bed. His beard is close-cropped and his Henley looks absolutely rumpled, like he didn’t bother with fresh laundry before getting here. He looks so healthy, Stiles wants to _cry._

“You scared us all s _o much_ ,” Derek says carefully, raising his hands like he wants to touch him somewhere but hesitates at the sight of all his bruising. Stiles doesn’t understand what it feels like to be on the reverse end of things after spending a week playing Schroedingers death-by-poison with Derek’s medication. May or may not work. May or may not get through this. He’s still so caught up on seeing the man awake and looking well that he barely hears the words Derek’s telling him. 

“...time I woke up all I could smell was your blood. She - whoever the fuck she was - jumped out of the window but I...I think, I don’t know, you got to her first. Whatever you did, you _saved_ me.”

“I -” Stiles’ breath hitches. He can’t remember. All he remembers is wanting to save Derek so much his world literally exploded. “What? I was like, blind and deaf for ten seconds.” 

Derek sits on his haunches to take Stiles’ hand in his. Apparently, Stiles hadn’t hallucinated that part. 

“I went to Deaton straight after your dad and I got you admitted. He told me, I don’t know, something about that book you and Chris were going through, something about mountain ash.”

“What about it?”

“Deaton said you’d know.” 

Stiles vaguely remembers visiting the idea of mountain ash as an incinerator for the poison. But that had required a magical conduit as the book said, a practitioner that not even Deaton was at the level of. Stiles recalls the assassin and the magic he felt her wielding. His dying wish at the time had been to just...save Derek. 

The realisation falls on him with a strange sense of peace and giddiness. “Holy shit,” he whispers, “who’dve _thunk.”_

Derek shakes his head, then presses his lips against the back of Stiles’ hand. “Whatever you did, you almost died trying to save me.” 

“I did not merely _try_ dude, I did save you,” he says with a smile curling on the edge of his mouth, which makes him flinch all of a sudden. Ow. Even smiling hurts. “Stupid assassin bitch,” he mumbles.

Derek huffs out a disbelieving laugh and rises to his full height momentarily before swooping down and placing his lips on Stiles’ forehead. Stiles feels the kiss all the way up to his toes and the tips of his fingers. 

“Did you just kiss my boo-boo away?” He asks slowly, endorphins flooding his head pleasantly and muting his aches. 

“Maybe,” Derek responds. “I’ll do it again if you tell me what you did to her.” 

“To who - ?” He asks dazedly. 

“Quote-unquote stupid assassin bitch.” 

“Oh, her. Yeah, I don’t like her.”

“I know you don’t. She hurt you, she’s on my list, too.” 

“ _You._ You are too sweet,” Stiles intones. 

Derek draws up a chair to sit at his bedside properly and makes a _go on_ gesture. 

“I just woke up from a mini-coma. I don’t think I’m allowed to talk like this.”

Derek only shrugs and smiles warmly at him. “Surprise us.” 

Stiles sighs exaggeratedly, but Derek’s not letting his hand go. That’s always a plus. “When you were in _your_ coma, Chris and I combed through the Argents’ compendiums. We found one way to take the poison out of you, and it required mountain ash and a powerful mage. We didn’t know of one, until...she-devil crashed in to finish the job for the Santa Rosa hunters probably.”

“Chris thinks so, too.” 

“Luckily _I’m_ a spark. A conduit. All I needed was her, I think, and the power of fucking love, apparently. Her bringing mountain ash to the party was just dumb luck and the universe aligning itself.” 

Derek looks at him like he’s something he’s never seen before, like he’s seen Stiles kill an omega and get fucked on a dinner table and spattered with blood, but he hasn’t really _seen_ him. Like he’s a hero and he’s everything holding Derek’s attention, eyes conveying so much gratitude and affection that Stiles is barely all-there to process yet.

He settles for, “It’s definitely a story for the grandchildren. Can I have my werewolf drug now?”

Derek rests a hand on the side of his face, and it doesn’t hurt like it should. 

“That’s the good stuff,” Stiles exhales. “Don’t stop yet, Sourwolf.”

“I won’t,” Derek promises, and then he’s leaning down again to kiss him on the lips, but Stiles turns his head to the side before it could land. The older man pulls away with a look of confusion.

“I’ve been asleep for three days,” Stiles reasons, “You do _not_ want to kiss me.” 

“You saved my life,” Derek reiterates, “I think I will.” 

Their mouths slot together, and it still doesn’t hurt. 

It doesn’t hurt at all. 

. . .

**Epilogue**

“How are you enjoying your single?” Stiles asks into the phone that’s wedged under his chin, a mixing bowl in the crook of his elbow and a whisk in the other hand.

_“Best fucking thing. Do you know how much sleep I’ve been getting, dude?”_

“Only slightly a bit more?”

“ _Correct. Catherine has more friends this year apparently.”_

“And Adam’s booking more gigs. Sucks to be you, man,” he chuckles. He splashes more flour in the mixture before putting more elbow grease into whisking.

_“Whatever. I got a single!”_

“You’re gonna miss rooming with me, don’t lie.” The oven dinging tears him away from mixing, and he masters the art of not burning himself in three-point-two seconds once he figures out using his knees to bend down with the oven door saves him the trouble of dislodging the phone from his ear. 

The bacon looks good, at least. 

_“Maybe,”_ Greg says flippantly. There’s a rustling on the other end of the line. “ _Fuck, I think I left my toaster in the van. Anyways, how’s online classes? Think you’ll be going back next term?”_

“Yeah, looks like it.” He starts heating up the waffle maker. “Though, I don’t think the Registrar’s gonna shit their pants about it. Or the profs. My switching learning platforms is a hot mess for everyone.”

_“You kidding? Even Doctor Goodall asked me about you. He, like, loves you apparently.”_

Stiles lets out a bark of laughter that makes him miss the mark on the paper towels he’s arranging on the serving tray. “Fuck off, you can’t play me like that at this hour.”

_“And you shouldn’t be making breakfast for dinner, but here we are. Also, you died, dude. So I think that’s gonna earn you some sympathy points.”_

“I did _not_ die. _Almost_ is the imperative word. Where is that damn -” he looks around for the syrup he had just taken out of the fridge and decided to disappear on its own. 

_“Whatever. Point still stands. You get a free pass, all the professors wanna give you flowers, and if you play your cards right you could probably get a single, too.”_

“I’ll keep that in mind, asshole. Listen, I gotta actually finish up here now. I’ll call you tomorrow, though.” 

_“Tomorrow is a Sunday, so no can do. Slam night, you forgetful bastard.”_

“Don’t tell on me,” he says with a smile, pouring the mixture onto the pan’s grids. 

_“I most definitely will. Catherine’ll send the video in the group chat.”_

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

_“Catch you later, Corpse Bride.”_

“Didn’t die!”

He finishes up dinner soon after and puts it all on the shiny new tray he bought just today. The kitchen was the first area of Derek’s loft they shopped for. He’s got an induction stove, a new island counter, and _wooden spoons_ now. 

Derek’s out on the spacious balcony, hanging the LED lights Stiles had forced him to put in their cart at the department store. Derek could protest all he wanted, but the view never looked this fucking fantastic. 

He whistles his arrival and puts down the tray of food. “This is looking great, Der.”

Derek hums his response as he steps down from the stool he’s stood on. He turns around and picks up a glass of orange juice from the tray, making a face right after. “I told you I don’t like the Minute Maid stuff.” 

Stiles puts his hands up. “You didn’t wanna go to Trader Joe’s so, really, that’s on you.” 

Derek heaves a defeated sigh and steps forward to wrap his arms around Stiles securely, linking his hands on the small of Stiles’. Their hips are aligned when Derek pulls back to look at him fondly. “Breakfast for dinner?”

“Just like we talked about,” Stiles agrees with a smile. “We’re doing it _all_ right this time, big guy. Or at least, making up for lost time anyways.” 

“I never kicked you out in the morning, to be fair.” 

“You kidding me? Fuckbuddies have a rule, and that’s no staying after the sun’s up. The _one_ time I stayed for breakfast, you broke up with me.”

Derek pulls an ever more sour face that Stiles can’t help but laugh at. “I don’t like talking about that.”

“That’s not what your therapist says.”

Derek presses a kiss on the side of his face. “You aren’t friends with my therapist.”

“I am _so_ friends with your therapist,” Stiles says, turning his head to brush against Derek’s mouth. 

Derek shakes his head in dissent, but it mimics an eskimo kiss with the way their noses touch and catch against each other. It’s an accidental gesture so sweet, Stiles has to tilt his chin up to kiss Derek fully, letting him taste all the chocolate Stiles snacked on while making waffles. He brings his hands to the handholds of Derek’s face and feels the stubble scrape against his fingers satisfyingly. 

Derek’s tongue slips in his mouth, meeting his, and it feels like coming home. It feels like finding his way back, the way his mother told him he’d be able to, because _the world is just much too round to reach dead ends_ , and so is the moon tonight, it seems. When they break apart, Stiles wants to take it further and pull Derek into the heat of the loft. It’s renovated. They have central heating now. But he doesn’t. 

Instead, he leads them to sit next to each other on the plastic chairs they got along with every new functional thing in the loft, the ones they’ll probably donate once they finish rebuilding the house. But right now, he’s got his wooden spoons and the balcony chairs, and a cat dozing on the couch named after a constellation currently watching over them. He’s got Derek, and Derek loves him. And this once, it feels like the stars have granted him one wish, _one good thing,_ like his mother had promised him. 

When he drops his waffle after flailing too hard, narrating a story about Catherine vs The Butt Chug, Derek doesn’t even blink; just replaces it with food from his own plate and tells Stiles to go on, and then Stiles has to stop for a second, struck with an overwhelming and sudden love for this man. It strikes him that he gets to have this, all of this, for the rest of his life.

The realisation feels like getting shot by a shooting star, crashing into him at the speed of _holy fuck._

 _Meteorites_ , right?

“You okay?” Derek asks. 

Stiles blinks, and lets a grin bloom on his face. “Yeah. I’m perfect.” And then, as an after-thought, “I love you.”

Derek only quirks an eyebrow. “I know.” 

Because he does. 

“ ‘Can’t believe you just Han Solo-ed me.”

“You did it last time.”

“I guess we just deserve each other.”

And they do.

  
  


**fin.**

**Author's Note:**

> *SLAMS LAPTOP SHUT* AND IT IS FINISHED!!
> 
> Leave a comment below to feed a starving author! 
> 
> Hang out with me on[tumblr](https://obscenitied.tumblr.com/) and [the sterek discord server](https://discord.gg/YuaTPfZ)


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